


Sowing Season

by geeraymes, heartofthesunrise



Category: Bandom, Midtown, Mindless Self Indulgence, My Chemical Romance, The Academy Is...
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/F, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-08-23 19:04:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8339182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geeraymes/pseuds/geeraymes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: The storm rolls in fast. It’s one of the details that, later, none of them will be able to recall because they’re so damn rattled, but there’s evidence all over.-Caught in a freak electrical storm, a group of young delinquents discover they've developed supernatural abilities, for better or worse. A Misfits AU in premise only.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Misfits AU is finally here! We've been hard at work plotting it out and getting roughs written since about June, so hopefully the posting schedule will be relatively brisk. There's a lot of introduction/exposition in this first chapter but it's a necessary evil. If you want to talk to either of the authors we're on tumblr at geeraymes.tumblr.com (author Jess) and swiss-army-romance.tumblr.com (author Jay). Thank you so much for reading!

I asked myself about the present:  
How wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.  
-Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse Five_ (1969)

 

It starts in a dozen different ways. It starts in a Walgreens. In a 7-Eleven. It starts after hours at an animal shelter with a strict put-down policy. It starts a year and a half ago at a party where nobody really knew each other yet.

Mostly, though, it starts in a community center locker room where Frank Iero is rolling up the legs of his orange jumpsuit up so they don’t trail over the back of his shoes. “This is fuck ugly,” he says to nobody in particular.

“Tell me about it,” Jamia replies. She’s got her dark hair clipped back in one of those cheap glittery barrettes you get in bins by the check-out line at Forever21 and she’s making it look well-chosen and hip. She’s incredible, but even she looks washed out and weird in the rusty community service uniform, and Frank feels bad for getting her in trouble, but it doesn’t stop him from being glad she’s here.

There is a lot of comfort to be taken in standing back-to-back with somebody, and Jamia’s even shorter than he is but he never feels unsafe with her around. The caper that landed them in here may have been his idea, but it was her meticulous planning that made them successful and kept them out of worse trouble. She pushes the sleeves of her jumpsuit up to her elbows, and when they slide back down immediately she just shoves on them until they stay. She’s just like that.

*

Jamia feels bad for getting Frank in trouble.

She thinks he’s too delicate to hack it in the criminal lifestyle, even if “the criminal lifestyle” is the next twelve weeks in community service. He looks small and improbable in his overlarge jumpsuit. She ruffles his hair. They’ve always been partners in crime, it’s just… more literal, now.

On Jamia’s short list of people who could definitely hack it in the criminal lifestyle, there’s a girl on the other side of the locker room with the reddest matte lipstick Jamia’s ever seen this early in the morning, wearing a shredded t-shirt and letting the top half of her jumpsuit drape back around her hips. Her hands are big and pale and streaked with what must be paint. She’s got an expression on her face that’s about ten seconds from dropping Jamia dead where she stands, until she notices Jamia watching her and cracks a big, sunny grin.

Frankly, she’s so hot Jamia wants to look away, because she knows she’s blushing already. It makes her feel a little powerless. She notices Frank noticing, and the stupid know-it-all smirk creeping over his face as he looks back and forth between them, and then the girl _winks_ and Jamia is done for. She cuffs Frank on the back of the head before he can make whatever smart remark he’s trying to phrase in his head.

The girl stares her down. Jamia resolves to stay as far away from her as possible, for what good it’ll do.

*

Lindsey winks cartoonishly at the only other girl at community service and is gratified when she flushes a the color of a wine-stained tablecloth. It’s nice, this time around, just the idea of some female companionship. Besides, it’s bullshit they stuck her here anyway - she’s not some tagger, she isn’t some thirteen-year-old spraypainting dicks in the industrial part of town. She is - and she’s fully prepared to admit how pretentious this makes her sound - an artist. And if the city’s going to ignore the “kill dykes” tag that’d been looming over the highway for days, she can’t really be blamed for taking matters into her own hands. Her mural may have been… a little explicit for some tastes, but she wasn’t about to _not_ paint a giant picture of two girls going to town on each other over somebody’s violent hate speech.

The circuit judge who’d heard her case looked tired, but he wasn’t unsympathetic. “Vandalism is vandalism,” he’d said in his worn out, grandfatherly voice. “You can’t let yourself stoop to their level.”

“Pretty hard to resist getting your hands dirty when some asshole’s calling for your head on a plate,” she’d retorted, and he’d pinched the bridge of his nose and given her a hundred and twenty hours of community service and waved her away.

Anyway, it’s not like she’s gonna be here forever. She should have all her hours in by the end of the summer - earlier, if she has anything to say about it. Most of these kids look like they’re in for the first time, all apprehensive big eyes, sticking to the edges of the room. There’s a guy so deep into the corner nearest her that he looks like he’s trying to sink into the floor, or the wall behind him, his eyes cast down behind thick glasses. She wonders what he’s in for: knowing the type, it’s either something completely mundane, like one too many traffic violations, or something completely skeevy, like spying through the window of a sorority house bathroom.

She figures she’ll find out one way or the other, or maybe she won’t and it won’t really matter anyway. He looks genuinely terrified when she smiles at him, though, which is a little gratifying considering he’s a lot bigger than she is.

Lindsey shrugs into the sleeves of her jumpsuit but leaves it mostly unzipped, because it’s fucking hot out, and wanders outside for a cigarette.

*

Ray watches a girl who could probably kick his ass just leave the locker room like she could go anywhere she wants, like she’s not required by law to be there. If this is some fucked up twentysomething version of The Breakfast Club she’s probably the Judd Nelson character. Ray’s definitely Anthony Michael Hall.

Yikes.

And it’s not like he should even fucking be here. When he’d told the caseworker assigned to him what he’d done to land himself in community service, she’d actually laughed and said “Seriously? That judge fucked you over,” before going over his options for commuting his sentence. Because it should’ve been a slap on the wrist, but he’d been in a white, affluent neighborhood in Tenafly, and at least twenty hours of his sentence probably had more to do with the fact that he was neither affluent nor white than the fact that he was an accidental shoplifter.

In all honesty he had _meant_ to pay for the batteries, even if fourteen dollars for two nine-volts that wouldn’t last a week in his pedalboard seemed pretty steep, but then some middle-aged guy built like he’d played rugby in college had followed him down three aisles and he’d panicked and bolted, batteries in hand like a fucking idiot.

It’s been a rotten couple of months, between the newly-empty apartment and how his life has been suddenly taken over by switching shifts at work so he could show up at the courthouse and plead his bullshit case. He’s barely been able to play guitar. The bands he was almost getting in with, or getting together on his own - the _reputation_ he’d been so close to nailing down before this mess - are dead on arrival, basically. He’s back to scouring the want ads in the Aquarian, blocking out auditions he won’t have time to practice for, between work and all this.

He rolls the sleeves of his jumpsuit up to his elbows. It’s humid outside but it’s worse, somehow, in here: the community center isn’t air conditioned and the locker room reeks like shower mold and gym clothes. Ray wants to go outside but he doesn’t want that girl to think he’s following her, like he’s some kind of creep. So he pushes his sleeves up again and doesn’t get a chance to savor his last moment of peace before somebody he recognizes walks in.

Well, fuck.

*

Gerard is right on James’s heels heading into the community center. They’re late because James wanted to stop at Wawa and get one of those nauseating mint chocolate chip flavored iced coffee monstrosities - he’s gesturing with the cup, telling one of his endless and improbable stories. It seems amazingly fucking lucky that they’re assigned at the same place. Gerard is falling in love with him and completely comfortable with the fact that he is, even though they haven’t even kissed, haven’t talked about it. They just both _feel_ it. This thing’s got legs.

Mikey trails behind them, deep into a game of BrickBreaker on his phone. With how the three of them had all squashed onto the bench seat of James’s pickup truck, James’s hand resting nonchalantly on Gerard’s knee, and Mikey wedged between Gerard’s other side and the window, Mikey’s definitely sick of both of them already. Gerard doesn’t really care, he’s giddy with the afterimage sensation of James’s hands on him.

James is moments away from a punchline of his joke when they walk into the locker room and he falters, looking at the assembled delinquents. “Shit,” he says bemusedly, dropping the empty cup into a trashcan. “The gang’s all here.”

“Hey, James,” two people, a guy and a girl Gerard doesn’t know, say almost in unison. The guy has the ugliest neck tattoo Gerard’s ever seen and the girl looks too clean to be hanging around with him - or with James, for that matter - but Gerard guesses they must be friends, and he guesses she did something to land her here. Appearances can be deceiving, or whatever.

Another girl comes into the room from the opposite entrance, glances up at them for a second, and says, “James, I know it’s been a while but you didn’t have to follow me into a life of crime, you could’ve picked up the phone if you wanted to hang out.” She smirks, and the fact that her cheek dimples appealingly in the middle doesn’t make her look any less dangerous. Gerard can’t decide if he wants to make out with her or be her.

“Lindsey, I think you’re projecting. You here for the - “ he makes a lewd gesture - “above I-95? Looks like your work.”

She winks at him. “You know the man can’t hold me down,” she says.

“If I’m remembering correctly you’re not opposed to the occasional woman holding you down, Lyn,” James says around a smirk. “This is Gerard and his brother Mikey, baby arsonists in the making. That’s Lindsey -” he points as he talks - “and those two hoodlums are Frank and Jamia.”

Because of course James would know every single young amateur criminal in Bergen county. James knows everybody.

There’s one guy left in the room, though. Gerard didn’t notice him at first, the way he’s as far back in the corner as he can make himself go. He glanced up when they came in but didn’t say hello - maybe there’s somebody left in the world James doesn’t know.

Of course that’s when James turns right to the guy and says “Hey, Ray,” in a soft voice Gerard’s never heard him use before.

That comes like a bit of a punch to the gut, because Gerard’s heard of Ray, assuming, like he is, that this is James’s epic heartbreak ex-boyfriend. If he is, he’s nothing like Gerard expected. He’s got a lot of curly hair and thick glasses that make his eyes look big and dark under the emphatic line of his brow. His face is soft and gentle, with a wide, pleasant mouth. The way James carried on, and the way James’s friends still talk about JamesandRay like the unit they had been was greater than the sum of its parts, Gerard figured Ray had to be some sort of intimidating rockstar type who’d broken James’s heart.

But if this is Ray… Gerard thinks he looks like sort of a nerd. Not that he isn’t cute - he has nice eyes, and when he looks up and smiles at James, the turn of his mouth wistful and odd, he looks handsome under the fluorescents. The whole locker room seems still and tense, everybody turned to Ray, waiting for him to speak. Ray doesn’t seem to notice, though. He’s watching James carefully.

“Hey,” he says at last. His voice is pleasant, musical and unexpectedly soft. “Been a while, huh?”

_“That’s_ Ray?” Frank exclaims, dousing the tense mood.

That starts Ray off blushing and looking like he wished he hadn’t said anything at all, and James is trying to glare at Frank and apologize to Ray at the same time, and Gerard sort of wants to melt into the floor because he thought if he and James were going to finally close the gap between them it might happen trapped in community service hell for a few weeks, like proximity was all they needed for their spark to catch. It looks like instead he’s gonna spend all his time hanging back with Mikey and watching James falling all over himself for the ex everybody says he never completely got over.

Which is. Well.

Mercifully they’re spared any continuation of this uncomfortable exchange when their parole officer walks in. He looks like somebody’s dad - like somebody’s dad who wants to be cool but really, really isn’t. “Okay, kids,” he says. He kinda sounds hungover, which could be good or bad for them, Gerard thinks. “I’m gonna see you one at a time in my office and then we’re gonna do some manual labor and atone for our sins.”

It sounds like he means it like a joke, but nobody laughs.

“Right,” the PO continues. He points at Mikey. “You can be first.”

*

Mark Hoppus isn’t having a bad day, really, it’s just that one day bleeds into the next and the next until everything’s indistinguishable, pockmarked occasionally by the days when something truly awful happens to break up the monotony. He’s got a new group of kids - no, not kids, they’re probably only seven or eight years younger than him - and it’s always a chore to learn names and to figure out everybody’s case.

The kid across from him - and this guy really does look like a kid, even if his file says he’s twenty - isn’t giving him much to go on.

“So Mikey,” he starts. “You set a convenience store microwave on fire with your brother. Did that, uh… Seem like a good idea at the time, or...?”

Mikey shrugs.

Mark waits for him to say something until the silence stretches uncomfortably long.

“We didn’t, like, mean to really. I just forgot you’re not supposed to put metal in there.” Mikey fidgets. “Can I go?”

“Yeah, okay.” Mark waves him out and tells him to send somebody else in.

Mark and Lindsey are actually pretty well-acquainted. He likes her, even if she’s stubborn and rude and too smart to get caught as much as she does. She comes into his office and sits sideways in the chair across the desk from him, her legs dangling over the arm.

“Hoppus!” she says. “You still pretending to play bass in that garage band?”

“You still getting written up for painting softcore porn instead of getting yourself an actual tag?”

She shoots him the finger guns and makes little “tchk-tchk” noises with her tongue.

“You know the drill. Zip up your fuckin’ jumpsuit, Ballato.”

She sends in Gerard, who’s exactly like his brother but sweatier. They make forty-five seconds of forced conversation before Mark gives up. “Send James in,” he calls to Gerard, because he’s acquainted with James and knows the guy can at least carry a conversation.

“Don’t think I’m gonna go easy on you,” Mark says when he sees James’s big grin. “We played like three shows together, that doesn’t make us friends.”

“No,” James agrees, “I guess it doesn’t.” He winks. “You telling me that story about getting caught mid-blowjob by Travis’s mom might, though.”

Mark puts his face in his hands and makes a long, miserable noise. “Dude…” he says into his palms. “Come on.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who decided to babysit juvenile delinquents for a living,” James says, raising both his palms in surrender. “I know which side of the desk I’m supposed to be on.”

“What’d you even do?” Mark says, reaching for James’s file out of the stack on his desk. It’s weighted asymmetrically with a mess of post-its and stapled-in addendums. He flips to the most recent pages. “Public indecency, seriously dude?”

“Oh come on, like you’ve never pissed in an alley,” James says. He’s a mouthy fucker.

“It says here you were in a public park,” Mark says, running his finger down the file. “And it was… eight in the morning? Dude, what is wrong with you?”

James shrugs. “Sometimes that’s how late the night goes.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get charged as a sex offender,” Mark says, rolling his eyes.

“I’ve still got time,” James says and he winks again, jerking his chin suggestively at Mark. His face changes, then, sobers up. “Hey I’m gonna send Ray Toro in here next, could you like? Be nice to him? I get the feeling being here really freaks him out and like, he probably shouldn’t be.”

Mark blinks. He’s read Ray’s file, he knows he shouldn’t be here, but it’s more than rare to see James look out for somebody in a way that doesn’t involve his fists. He’ll punch a dude out for shittalking a buddy, he’ll brawl in a barfight to have a friend’s back, but this is… Different.

It takes a second to click.

“Wait, you mean this kid is your Ray?” Mark’s leaning well across the desk now, not caring that this sort of gossip is unprofessional, because fuck, it was the talk of the touring New Jersey punk circuit when James got dumped by his mysterious quiet genius boyfriend. The bender he went on that week went down in history, practically.

James frowns. “Not my Ray. His own Ray.”

“Yeah, _now."_

“Come on, dude, just go easy on him.” James looks, suddenly, as exhausted as Mark feels.

“Yeah, alright, don’t worry about it. I’ll be an absolute lamb.”

James bumps his knuckles against Mark’s fist and leaves, and when Ray comes in Mark has to restrain himself from prying.

“So you know your sentence is, like…” Mark searches for an appropriate word. “Bullshit.” Good enough. “Right?”

Ray shrugs and adjusts his glasses. “My caseworker told me the same thing.”

Mark stares at him. “And you didn’t contest it or anything? Fuck, dude, I know the system is broken but like…”

Ray shrugs again. It’s an odd, quiet little gesture on him, a lift of the shoulders and an abrupt drop, like an exhale. “Seems like a lot of trouble, I guess.”

“Yeah but like, this is on your permanent record and it’s gonna kinda rule the rest of your summer.” Mark’s halfway to offering to help him even though it’s definitely more trouble than it’s worth.

“Look, man,” Ray says around a sigh. He pinches the bridge of his nose and has to resettle his glasses. “I’m not gonna run for office, I don’t want to talk to a lawyer, I just want to get this over with so I don’t have to -” He sort of looks like he wants to puke. Mark wants to ask if it’s about James but he promised he’d be nice. “So I can just put it in the past.”

Mark nods. “Okay,” he says. “You can send…” He paws through the mess of folders. “Frank in.”

Mark’s hangover hates Frank. Mark kind of hates Frank, too, because the second Frank sat down he started yelling.

“First of all,” Frank exclaims, “what kind of animal shelter has that high a kill rate? Might as well call it what it is, it’s a fucking slaughterhouse!”

Mark resists the urge to rub his temples. The thing about running the community service assignments is, most of the time he doesn’t really think the kids should be there. Petty crime is mainly victimless, a lot of the time it has to do with luck of the draw with circuit court judges, and at his core Mark’s a live-and-let-live kind of guy. Does he want to yell at a kid for setting a bunch of dogs free that were slated to be put down? Of course he doesn’t. But it’s not like he’s allowed to condone that sort of thing.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he says, finally, “but you do have to, y’know, do the time. Send in your accomplice, would you?”

Horrifyingly, Jamia is louder and worse. “Hell yeah, I stole those dogs,” she says. She’s not even on a soapbox about it the way Frank was. “I’d do it again. Give me one of those pointy sticks and show me the garbage, I’m ready.”

And if that’s the way she’s gonna play it, it’s not like Mark is looking to prolong the whole getting-to-know-you process. He follows her out of his office and back to the locker room where the rest of the guys are chatting or texting, leaning up against the lockers.

“Okay,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “You’ve got your, y’know.” He makes a motion to indicate their jumpsuits. “We’re gonna go clean the graffiti off the front of this place for a few hours. No augmenting it, Lindsey, I mean it.”

*

The second day is mediocre, the third day is strange. Not everybody shows up all the time, because most of them all still have jobs to go to, but they share - if nothing else - a mutual desire to get this over with. They’re not all back in the same place until the next Wednesday, when Mark trundles them out to the side of the highway in the community center van and teaches them how to walk across the empty lot in a grid to collect the big litter people have chucked there.

“I’ll come get you guys at noon,” he tells them as he gets back up in the van. He’s very hands-off, is Jamia’s impression of him. The lot is dirty, pockmarked with weeds and spiderwebbed with cracks where dandelions and grass have pushed through. Lindsey bends at the waist and picks a big, fluffy dandelion between two paint-stained fingers, and Jamia watches the way her lips form a soft, red _“oh”_ shape to blow on it.

The seeds scatter in the breeze. Lindsey smiles. Jamia doesn’t even have a dandelion to wish on, but she wishes she knew what Lindsey wished for, anyway. The breeze picks up around them in a way that makes Jamia think maybe the summer is making a wish of her own, too.

They work through the morning. Mikey and Frank find a fridge door and haul it to the dumpster together. Half an hour later they find the rest of the fridge and it takes both of them plus James and Ray to carry it, and even then they have to stop and rest twice before they can get it all the way to the refuse pile. It’s sweaty, unpleasant work but Jamia’s surprised to find she’s kind of having fun with it.

Mainly, Lindsey is fun.

The previous night they’d ended up the only two delinquents to show for an evening thing Mark had proposed to their group: the community center hosted painting classes for the elderly, and it was a way to knock some hours out with the added bonus of avoiding backbreaking labor. Frank had bailed at the last minute and Jamia had gone alone, and been pleasantly, breathlessly surprised to find Lindsey there wearing something more modest than her usual style, with her hair pinned back out of her face, scrubbed free of makeup.

“People don’t usually turn up for these things,” she’d said, and offered Jamia a cigarette.

The evening had been… Jamia can’t think of a word, because _nice_ doesn’t really mean much, but the way Lindsey had leaned over the shoulder of a grandmotherly lady and admired the lines in her painting of peonies had made her chest tight then, and it did now, to remember it. She’d driven by the graffiti that had landed Lindsey in community service in the first place and even though it’s censored with whitewash it still made her blush. It’s like Lindsey believes in art the same way Jamia’s grandmother believed in god before she died, like it’s a given. She’d wanted to give Lindsey a ride home afterward but hadn’t known how to ask, had instead watched her walk to the bus stop until the darkness swallowed her, dark hair and pale skin and tartan raincoat made muddy by the low light, then invisible.

Jamia keeps Lindsey in her line of sight as they cross the lot again and again, looking for cans, plastic bags, detritus in the grubby weeds where the pavement falls away and it’s all dirt and crabgrass. Up ahead Frank and Mikey are sharing a cigarette, because Frank’s been out all day and Mikey’s the only one still willing to share with him. They’re leaned up against a scrubby tree, Mikey all gangly limbs beside Frank’s stocky, broad-shouldered body. Jamia could pick Frank out of a lineup of a hundred from across a football field without her contact lenses in, that’s how well she knows him. It’s almost a little weird to see him chumming with somebody she doesn’t know so well. But it’s good for him. For both of them, probably.

And then there’s the thing they all sort of know about but none of them want to address, the thing where Jamia caught James’s face as he walked into the community center on day one and saw Ray for the first time, probably, since he was moving all his stuff out of their apartment two months ago. The way his cocky grin had crumpled at the edges, and how his posture had changed, and how the kid behind him - _Gerard,_ she reminds herself - had seen it all and looked crestfallen and then resigned. It was like an entire season of a teen soap condensed into about three seconds. Out in the field, Jamia watches them triangulate around each other.

She doesn’t know Ray because nobody really knew him, when he and James were together. He was like this mythic hero people only ever heard about because he didn’t like parties and he worked nights a lot, but James was absolutely stupid about him and never shut up about it, and that in itself was a small miracle. She’d never seen James that way about anybody, before or since. She guesses they must’ve found something in each other they couldn’t come up with on their own, they’re so different. She wonders what changed.

Gerard is obvious in the way he trails after James. It’s hard to watch, nearly, but she can’t look away. The way they’d walked in almost on each other’s arms that first day and not once since then. They’re not together, so says the ever-churning north Jersey rumor mill, but it’s clear they were headed that way and that Ray is the branch in the spokes of their bicycle built for two. It’s a shame, mostly. Jamia considers herself an empathetic person; she wants everybody to be happy.

But the way things are and the way things should be are so rarely aligned, so she watches them skirt around each other and not talk, or talk too much. She watches the way Frank leans in towards Mikey to light the end of a new cigarette off the ember of the old one. She watches Lindsey check her phone, and smooth her hands through her thick hair where the humidity is making it frizz out a little bit, and the way that, silhouetted against the ominous sky, she is so, so beautiful.

She digs the toes of her sneakers into the loose soil and breathes in the summer.

*

The storm rolls in fast. It’s one of the details that, later, none of them will be able to recall because they’re so damn rattled, but there’s evidence all over. None of them really had time to react.

It’s been building towards rain all day, the slow way it does in Jersey in the summertime. A wet, condensed simmer that means it might not even spill over today, maybe tonight or tomorrow, the 24 hour prelude to a frantic, feverish climax. But when the first heavy clouds crest the horizon, blown in on some invisible wind, nobody is really expecting them. When they purl out over the field where everyone in an orange jumpsuit is complaining about trash and not really picking it up anymore, it seems like it’s come out of nowhere. The sky flashes and a guttural roar of thunder seems to be dragged up from underneath them, it’s so low and so close.

“Jeez,” Mikey says, swiping his sweaty hair off his face with one hand. That’s all he has time for before whatever tension is keeping the clouds from spilling is stomped down, and they’re all drenched in moments.

It would be laughable, the seven of them in their ugly orange jumpsuits surrounded by trash in the goddamn pouring summer rain, like a cartoon parody of the most pathetic thing you can think of. It _would_ be funny, except the sky is a perilous, bruised color and strobes of lightning light the undercarriage of the clouds in a way that smells dangerous. A hailstone the size of a fist hits the ground and shattered a few feet to Mikey’s left and they all jump.

They’re too far out down the highway to get back to the community center - everything around them is scrubby trees and a couple of broken down factory buildings with padlocks on the doors, not much in the way of shelter. In the curious, still moment between volleys of hailstones, Gerard sees James shift into the person they need him to be. He stands up taller and puts a hand on Gerard’s elbow, and he looks, in the eye of the storm, like a leader.

“I’m gonna go get Mark and we’ll come back and pick you guys up in the van. Try to find some shelter.” He tugs his beanie down around his ears and sets off in the direction of the community center at a jog, not looking back.

The rest of them stand there stupidly for a moment, just watching as James grows dark in the rain and then disappears entirely.

“Fuck,” Jamia says when a hailstone hits the ground near her and startles them all. “Right, we need to take cover.”

“I’m gonna go after James,” Gerard says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “What if he gets hurt?”

Ray starts forward at that, but Gerard is already off and running down the highway, his hands arms over his head to protect him from the hail, looking off kilter and silly. 

“Come on,” says Lindsey, and she herds the rest of them into the meager shelter of a scrubby birch tree.

Gerard catches up with James over the crest of a hill, and they’re both out of breath already, trying to jog through the heavy rain. Gerard grabs James’s bicep and then links their arms together. With the two of them, like this, it almost doesn’t feel like an end-of-the-world level freak storm. They’re still hurrying, though, especially when a hailstone catches Gerard on the side of the face and gashes him.

“Christ,” James says. He tugs the sleeve of his jumpsuit loose from the knot where it’s tied around his waist and dabs at the blood, cradling Gerard’s face in his other hand. “We gotta hurry.”

They make a dash for it, then, because the turnoff to the community center parking lot is in sight a ways up ahead and once they get there they’re practically indoors, where there’s a first aid kit and a change of clothes and an adult to take responsibility for them. It’s an wide open field between them and shelter, and Gerard grabs James’s hand and starts to run even though they’re both winded and soaked.

There is a flash of light, and Gerard feels James’s wrist tug out of his grip as they’re both thrown into the air, and then, just as suddenly, there is nothing.

*

James wakes up to a sunny sky. If it weren’t for the broken branches and the still-damp earth underneath him, he’d think he’d hallucinated the whole storm. There’s a dark shape a ways off that’s rumpled the way that Gerard is rumpled, though, and it’s not moving. James gets himself up in a hurry and he’s already yelling before he’s halfway to him.

“Gerard, Gee, are you okay?”

The shape groans and shifts and James is overcome with a wave of relief.

“Fuck,” Gerard says, squinting into the sunlight. “Weren’t we just recreating a scene from Twister out here?”

James laughs. It’s almost too hot, now, the sunlight burning off what was left of the cloud cover. Ground water steams up from the soil around them.

“I think we’re good? We should go make sure nobody got decapitated by a rogue hailstone, and then I think we should like… Call it a day.” He’s not sure what the protocol for weathering a freak storm is when it comes to court-mandated community service but he’s pretty sure Hoppus won’t be hard to persuade.

“Yeah,” Gerard says. He pulls himself up, first to sitting, then to standing, like he’s doing a quality control check on all his composite parts. The gash on his face isn’t bleeding anymore, but the dried smear of blood on his cheek looks more gory than it has any right to in the harsh sunlight. “Did I fall?” he asks. “I feel like I got hit by a fucking truck.”

Which is odd, because James can’t remember, really, and he doesn’t feel sore at all. They’re a ways from where they left the rest of the group, and they walk in relative quiet, breathing in the odd mood. They both start running, though, when they crest the hill and see a person-sized fire, and Jamia frantically trying to smother it with her sweatshirt.

“Is that Frank?” James yells when they’re close enough. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Jamia ignores him. Lindsey grabs her own hoodie up off the ground and throws it over what is, pretty obviously, Frank at the center of a plume of orange-white flame.

The bizarre part is, he seems unperturbed.

“Guys, I’m fine,” he says, though he’s muffled by Jamia’s sweatshirt and he’s oddly hard to hear underneath the flame.

_“You’re on fire,”_ Lindsey insists, patting her hoodie over him with quick, careful hands. She’s got the sleeves of her jumpsuit rolled down to protect her hands and James can see the edges of her cuffs starting to singe.

Which is true, and then, suddenly, it isn’t. James blinks and he’s missed it. Frank smells weird, scorched, and his own clothes are pretty ragged, even the fire-retardant government issue jumpsuit hanging off him. He’s grinning, though, a sheepish kind of smile that straddles the border between smug and guilty. More noticeably, he’s not on fire anymore.

“What happened?” James asks, and Gerard looks at him like, _thank you, Captain Obvious._

“Don’t freak out,” Frank is saying, looking from Jamia to Lindsey, and then over to where Mikey is still under the tree, looking shaken, his head in his hands. “Mikey, come on.”

Mikey jerks away from him when Frank approaches. “Can you not do that right now,” he says. It’s tense and strange, and James steps back just to put another foot of distance between himself and the scene in front of him.

“Where’s James?” Jamia asks. She’s looking right at Gerard. James clears his throat; he guesses she might not have noticed him what with all the combustion and drama.

Gerard looks confused, then condescending. He points. She looks, and turns back to him and says “Are you okay?” which is pretty fucking confusing.

“He’s right there, dude,” Gerard says, putting a hand out to touch James’s elbow. In a moment that is both completely chilling and bizarrely invasive, Gerard’s hand passes straight through James’s arm and they both shudder.

“Dude, what the fuck just happened?” James says. Gerard’s looking at him with the same confused look James knows is echoed on his own face.

“Sorry, can I just…” He touches him more carefully, this time, or he tries to. When Gerard’s fingertips dip to touch James’s forearm, they clip through him like he’s nothing.

“Well,” Gerard says, mainly to himself. He turns to Jamia and says in his most matter-of-fact voice, “If I know anything about comic books, we’re gonna all have to make up some matching costumes. I think James is invisible." 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out a little more about some powers. Major trigger warnings for character death and explicit discussion of suicide, with the caveat that nothing is permanent in this fic. Read with caution, though, it gets graphic. 
> 
> As always you can get author Jess on tumblr @geeraymes and author Jay @swiss-army-romance. We're, you know, sorry

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could prove things with our mind, and know for certain that things are always in their place. I’d like to know what a place is like when I’m not there. I’d like to be sure.  
-Ray Bradbury, _The Illustrated Man_ (1951)

  


When Ray wakes up everybody is already standing, and everybody is yelling.

Gerard is back, Ray sees, but he doesn’t seem to have James with him. He’s yelling at Jamia, or, they’re yelling at each other… He can’t really tell _what’s_ going on. Their conversation is hard to follow, and he’s confused as he stands up, thinking maybe he’s in shock, wondering what about that freak storm knocked him out, and then he clears his throat and puts a hand out to touch Mikey on the shoulder, and he’s got a lot more to be confused about all of a sudden.

Ray is confused, mainly, by the fact that he can't seem to touch anything, and the fact that nobody seems to be able to hear or see him. They're all freaking out because of course they are, though - Frank is standing there with his clothes half burned off him grinning mildly into the sunshine and Lindsey keeps gesturing to him and putting her hands exasperatedly up in the air. Beyond them, Gerard seems really fucking worried about James, which gets Ray's heart racing. Gerard is pointing over his shoulder and saying “James is here” over and over while Jamia insists he’s wrong. Ray can’t see anything, really, from where he is. He thinks that if he's in some sort of miasma of an afterlife maybe James is here, too, and maybe they can find one another and they can bring each other back. This is, he hates to admit, uncannily similar to a dream he had not very long after they broke up, when he'd been missing James just about to death. If Gerard can see James, though, maybe he’ll see Ray. At least maybe he’ll be able to talk to him and figure out what’s going on, although Ray doesn’t much relish the idea.

He paces in a slow circle around the rest of them. It's weird, it's like seeing through water, or, no - something thicker, like honey - every color bleeds out a little bit, makes a strange lens flare of a halo around them. He has to focus harder than he wants to, just to hear them, but he wants to know if James is alright. He startles when he hears his own name.

"What about Ray?" Frank is asking. "Where'd he go? He was right fuckin’ here."

Lindsey shakes her head slowly, like she's not sure even where to begin. "It might be, I mean, we might do well to prepare for a worst case scenario on that one. You really can't see him, Gerard?"

Gerard presses his lips into a tight line and shakes his head, and then he looks over his shoulder and says, "I know."

"You've gotta stop doing that," Jamia says.

"Hey," Gerard defends, "Just because you can't see James doesn't mean he's not there. He says 'fuck you' by the way."

Jamia rolls her eyes.

Ray’s still holding out hope that if he gets over to Gerard’s other side James will be there, somebody else curiously invisible and frightened, somebody who, despite everything, cares about what happens to Ray. Guilt and hope and nausea churn in his stomach. He dodges around Jamia and steps behind Gerard and looks for James, and there’s just… nothing.

It's not like there's anything James could be hiding behind, just flat, empty highway in every direction and the rec center way off to the left of them.

"James," he says aloud, feeling stupid. "James I know I'm, like, probably not the person you want to see right now but if you're around I'm... I'm really scared." Which is sort of a bitch to admit except how could he not be.

Nothing changes. The air still ripples around him, all thick and odd. He tries to shake it off himself but he can't even discern completely where he ends and the rest of it begins. He's blurred like a crappy photograph, even to his own eyes.

"James, come on, this isn't funny," he says. He can feel his voice hiking up into his throat, tight the way it gets when he really doesn't want to cry but is definitely going to. And what a way for James to find him - of course if he starts crying, James will have to turn up just to see how much of a fucking baby he is. Of course he’ll be there. So when a fat, hot tear rolls down Ray's cheek a moment later he's completely expecting James to just appear in front of him, and turn away to give him a moment, like the courteous asshole he is. He's expecting it so much that when it doesn't happen he's actually shocked.

"Fuck," he says out loud. And then, in one sudden moment, he feels all of the warmth ripped from the fuzzy edges of his body. It feels like the air is choked out of his lungs, like he's dying or drowning, and then, abruptly, the warmth and the air floods back in. Like he stepped through a waterfall and it pummeled him, freezing. _"Fuck,"_ he says again, more emphatic. This is bad.

"James has a theory," Gerard is saying, and he's nodding and looking at empty air again, someplace between him and where he can't see Ray. "He's gonna look for Ray. The rest of us need to go, though, we should get home. This is... A lot."

And then they're all moving off, and Ray doesn't know whether to stay and wait for James to find him, if James even can, which he doubts, or to go home, where he won't be able to get into his house and if he does he'll probably terrify his mother to death. He doesn't want that.

He watches the rest of them trooping back to the rec center and he follows at a listless distance, trying not to feel excluded, reminding himself that it's not like they can help it. He wonders how James is looking for him, if he's going to find anything. Ray doesn't even know what happened, not really. Maybe he should be looking for him, too.

He circles towards the rec center. It smells like petrichor, like burning ozone, just a little bit, and that fresh scent of wet asphalt. He tries to remember just what was happening before the storm blew in, where he was standing out there, what he was doing.

What James was doing.

With no real expectation he heads back to the path James and Gerard had been taking on their way to get Hoppus, and that's when he sees it. His stomach gives a tremendous lurch when he recognizes one of James's tennis shoes, the rubber on the sole strangely molten, like a cooling lava flow. He doesn't want to keep moving forward but he makes himself do it, skirts around a scrubby scotch broom shrub. He knows, somewhere in the pit of his stomach, what he's going to find. It doesn't make it any less awful, though.

There, sprawled out the same way he sleeps, is James. Except that it isn't James, it can't be, because James is talking to Gerard and arguing and it's the same way it's always been except no one can see him. This is... Somebody else, some impossible lookalike with the same patchy blue hair and the same cargo shorts and the same... Ray puts his hand out to stroke the column of kanji that crawl down the length of James's forearm. It's only then that he realizes everything's gone back to tight focus: he's solid, tangible, his fingers on James's cool skin. He sinks down onto his knees, and overbalances so that when he falls, his head lands on James's chest. He presses his cheek into it, hoping, hoping, hoping.

There's no familiar pulse, no rise and fall of breath, and he's... It's not even that he's cold, but James was so warm in life, Ray had trouble sleeping next to him because he radiated heat like a goddamn furnace, and this James shaped thing under Ray's hands is lukewarm at best, like anything soft set out in the sun. Ray pushes back on his hands and then clasps them together, pounds them on James's chest until he feels them starting to bruise. He pushes James's head back and pinches his nose and huffs into his mouth trying not to think about how the last time he touched James this intimately it was to kiss him. His mouth is cold and unresponsive. Ray pounds on his sternum until he hears something crack, and James doesn't move, doesn't respond.

"FUCK," Ray wails, trying to breathe into James's mouth again. "James, this isn't fucking funny, you can't fucking do this to me!"

When he thinks of it he feels like a fucking idiot, like maybe if he'd done this right away there'd be some shot of saving him. He fumbles his cell phone out of his pocket and dials 911.

"Please," he says, immediately. "I'm at the Robeson rec center and there was this storm, and my friend, he's not moving."

"Have you tried CPR?" the dispatcher asks him.

"Of fucking course I have!" Ray snaps, and then hates himself. "Please, can you send an ambulance, ma'am I can't lose him."

She promises him that someone is on the way and offers to stay on the line, but Ray hangs up and collapses beside James's body. He can feel it happening again, that dizzying nightmare fugue state that he was in before he found James, and he shuts his eyes, willing it to not happen. When he opens them again, though, everything's gone queer and blurry, and when he puts out a hand for what little comfort the solidity of James's chest can give him, it's like there's nothing there on the end of his arm. Like he's made of smoke.

 

*

 

James watches Ray wink out of existence, all at once, like a light.

He wants to throw up. He walks over to his body, looks down at it, and anticipates a queasiness that never comes. He looks, actually, kind of like this photo Smack took of him the first time he smoked a blunt, all passed out and mussed up, except there's a weird crooked dip in his t-shirt where he's pretty sure Ray broke a couple of his ribs, and a fast-drying wet spot there in the middle of his chest where - and his chest, seriously defying the physics of not having a body, feels tight at the thought - Ray must've been crying.

_"God,"_ he says, once. A few minutes later, he sees the ambulance pull up.

It’s profoundly alienating to watch the paramedics check his pulse, feel the spot where Ray broke his ribs, and haul him on a stretcher up into the ambulance. He gets in behind them because he doesn’t have anything better to do, and - out of habit more than anything else - presses himself to a corner out of their way while they try to bring him back to life. He wonders if Ray watched them take him away.

He wonders where Ray is, if he’s alright… He wonders what happened to him.

There’s the weird casualty with which the paramedics treat his body once it’s clear he’s no longer in it. They slide him out of the ambulance at the hospital and a worn-out looking doctor declares him dead on arrival. A nurse looks through his pockets for his wallet and cell phone, and as much as he doesn’t want to watch her call his mother, he wants even less to follow his pale corpse down to the morgue to get cut open, or whatever it is they do down there.

Turns out hospital waiting rooms aren’t much different when you’re dead.

It’s when his mom comes in that it really hits him. She looks the same as she did when he left this morning, in that awful blue sweater she bought when he was a kid and still wears around because she’s sure it’ll come back into fashion. Her hair is all hastily pinned back like she rushed out the door, except she always looks like that. But James figures this is the occasion to hurry, if ever there was one. He wonders if she called Smack. He feels sick looking at her, at the way she seems confused, first, and then defiant, and then broken. The doctor she’s talking to leads her away and he can’t bring himself to follow her.

When she comes back from the morgue she’s drying her eyes on the cuff of her sweater. An orderly goes over some paperwork with her and she signs it all, pausing in the middle to scrub both palms over her face. It’s a gut punch to watch. It’s worse, maybe, than watching Ray try to resuscitate him, although if he wasn’t already dead that would’ve probably killed him. When she hands the clipboard back to the orderly and starts rummaging around her purse for her car keys, James gets up and goes with her. It’s not that he wants to, more like… He should.

He rides in the passenger seat of her car. The floor is all covered with the kind of trash you accumulate when you’re a busy mother, receipts and cough drop wrappers and the empty plastic cup from an iced coffee she got god knows how long ago. His mother is sitting beside him with bloodshot eyes, staring ahead at the road, and he wishes more than anything that she could hold him and tell him it’s alright. He wants to do the same thing for her.

When they get home Smack is just pulling into the driveway and James listens to his mom sit him down and tell him what’s happened.

It’s bad.

James has never seen Smack cry before, not that he can remember. He’s got his face buried in the fabric of their mom’s blue sweater and his shoulders are shaking and James wants, very badly, to be anywhere else. He tries, experimentally, to talk to them, like his spirit, or whatever it is he is now, could reassure them that he’s feeling no pain, but they can’t hear him. He tries shouting and nothing changes. They stay in tableau, James’s mom’s hand on the back of Smack’s neck while he cries into her shirt, one heavy, stoic tear poised in her eye, ready to spill. “I know, baby,” she says, and something about that phrase flips the switch in James’s mind from uncomfortable to untenable. He has to leave.

It’s then that he remembers there is, actually, somebody he can talk to, and if he had a stomach it’d drop straight into his shoes. Gerard. He’s gonna have to tell Gerard. 

He leaves his mom’s house - probably for the last time, he thinks - through the closed front door and sets off in the direction of Gerard’s.

He’s gotta tell him. He knows that Gerard won’t want to hear it, but he’s gotta. James is dead, and something about what happened in that storm means Gerard can still see him, which means maybe there’s something wrong with Gerard. He can’t not tell him.

Maybe it’s because they were together when whatever happened to them… Happened. It seems like it should have some corollary with what he saw Ray do earlier, blink in and out of existence like Nightcrawler, but he doesn’t know where Ray is when he can’t see him, and even if he did… He doesn’t want Ray to be dead, not ever, even if it _would_ be a comfort to have someone going through this with him. He can’t even look directly at the fact that there are things he wanted to say to Ray, stuff he was hoping to work through. He can’t, right now. Gerard has to come first.

*

He hesitates on the stoop. He’s walked to Gerard’s house because what else can he do, call a cab? It took hours but he doesn’t feel tired at all. That’s probably a thing of the past, he guesses. He tried to knock but when his hand passed through the door he just let himself in, calling out for Gerard. Ghost rules are weird, some things work for him, but most don’t. He forces a smile as Gerard comes out into the hall and sees him. He’s standing in the doorway to his bedroom, and behind him his room is a mess, like always. It stops James in his tracks. He’s been here before, plenty of times, and it falls heavy on him that he’ll never be here in the same way again. He’s still not sure how to say any of this. Gerard turns to look at him, and brow furrowed. James herds him back into his bedroom. Better they’re not… Better _Gerard’s_ not overheard.

“James, what’s up? You look like you saw a ghost.” He laughs a little and James feels sick. He can’t. He has to.

James clears his throat, looking down to his fingernails and chipping away at the black polish. Will that come back? He stops himself in case it doesn’t, and looks at Gerard. “Listen, Gee. We gotta talk. Like, serious-like, alright?” His posture is stiff, but he can feel himself nearly shaking. He hopes that Gerard doesn’t notice - if he does, he’s not saying anything. The last thing James wants is to hurt him, even though this whole situation sucks and hurts. He takes a slow and even breath and meets Gerard’s eyes.

Gerard doesn’t like this. It feels like a breakup, even though they’re not technically ‘together’ yet. It’s gotten complicated, with Ray being around and everything that went down earlier, but they’re still on the cusp of something, he knows it. It’d suck for it to die before it left the nest. Gerard frowns.

“James… What’s going on?”

James takes another breath. He tried practicing what he was going to say on the long walk to Gerard’s, but it still sits like bile in his throat. There’s no nice way to say this, he realizes. He goes for a direct approach.

“Yeah, so... I’m dead.”

Gerard studies him, his expression painted in confusion. The words don’t quite register to him. It feels like another language, where a sole cognate had slipped in between the sentence, but regardless, hardly any of it makes sense. ‘Dead’ can’t be a word that applies to James. He’s anything but, in every way. From his body language to his laugh to the stories he has to tell, James is vibrant and alive, more than anybody else Gerard knows. Gerard gambles a smirk, and lets out a hesitant chuckle.

“Dude, what are you talking about? You’re right here.”

James breaks his gaze away from Gerard’s glare, shaking his head. This fucking sucks. Not as bad as having to watch his mom crumple into a pile of tears on the living room couch, but he feels like by the end of this that it’ll get damned near close. That might help his case, actually. He sets his jaw, forcing himself to look back at Gerard.

“Look. I was looking for Ray, and I found -” James can feel that stupid itch behind his eyeballs, and he shakes his head at Gerard, and how illogical it is that he can cry without having a body. “I found myself. Not, like, spiritually, or whatever,” he laughs even as the first tear spills over. “I found my body. I saw the paramedics try to resuscitate me. I saw my mom come to the hospital, I know.” This isn’t going well. “I couldn’t. Talk to her. I couldn’t even touch her, Gee, she was just there on the couch with Smack and I was shouting and they couldn’t hear me.”

“That’s not funny, James.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, I need you to _listen._ ” James puts his palms over his face and presses in, the same way his mom did in the hospital. He takes a deep breath. “Gerard, I died in the storm. I’m sorry.”

“Shut the fuck up, man!” Gerard snaps the words at James, shaking his head in disgust. This doesn’t feel right, it’s too heavy, a knot of lead in his belly. The way James’s face is crumpling in on itself, the way Gerard’s seeing him _cry._ Gerard’s known that James can pull ridiculous stunts for a laugh or two, it’s a big reason why he’s so into him. But this isn’t funny. He didn’t take James to be the type to be cruel like this.

“You’re not the one who’s fucking dead, dude," James says. He’s so resigned, he sounds exhausted. Gerard doesn’t want to hear it.

"Stop it! You're not dead, James!"

James doesn’t want to yell, but he also hadn’t wanted to cry. His face feels hot and wet and awful, and it has no right to. It's not even there. James stares at Gerard. He doesn't want to have to prove this to him, can’t think of a way to do it that won’t traumatize him more than it probably already has. There's still a part of him that thinks this whole thing can end rationally.

"Gee, I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't for real, but I'm -"

"Cut it out, James!"

Gerard makes to shove James in the chest. There’s nothing he can do to stop it. James' eyes widen as Gerard moves with full momentum right through him. He thuds to the floor and lays there for a moment, and then he’s laughing, muffled where he’s face down in a heap of laundry, only it doesn’t sound funny or happy or anything. James just stands there. It’s not like he can help Gerard to his feet, after all.

*

_He's dead, he's dead, my best fucking friend is dead and I can't even..._ Gerard slowly tries to push himself up. Everything James has said so far seems irrefutable now and it settles heavy on him. This is a familiar numbness. It's suffocating, stifling, surrounding. It’s loud in his head and it’s too quiet in his body, like if he can’t control anything else at least he can be completely still.

_Shoulda been me, why wasn’t it me? He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. I miss him, I can’t fucking touch him. He’s dead, he’s dead._ It’s too loud. He wants to yell at James, to hit him, to hit himself. He doesn’t know what he wants.

James is looking down at Gerard. He wipes tears away from his face like he’s embarrassed or ashamed, like he wants to be strong for Gerard. He kneels down to Gerard’s level, and uselessly tries to help him up. Gerard flinches.

“Don’t fucking touch me!”

James jerks his hand away from Gerard’s arm. He sits back on the floor and he puts his hands up in surrender. He’s starting to get annoyed, Gerard can tell, and his tone is real fucking bitter when he says, “Couldn’t if I wanted to, Gee.”

It’s not fair. Gerard tries to hang onto his anger but he can’t, tries to maintain the stoicism he’d had a moment ago but there’s nothing left of it. He stifles a sob into his fist, and then he’s just crying, messy and uninhibited, like a kid. Everything he ever wanted to do with James is gone. No first date, no first kiss, no waking up wrapped up in each other after spending the night together. No possibility of seeing where they’d go, even if it’s bad, even if it doesn’t last. He can’t stop crying, can’t stop thinking of everything he’s lost before he even had it, knowing he’ll never be able to replicate it. It doesn’t matter if he can see James right there, because he’s gone. Nothing matters. Nothing can fix this. Gerard fights to even his breathing. He can’t look at James.

He finally pushes himself up off from the ground. Everything hurts - he’s still sore from when the storm tossed him to the ground, even if - in light of recent developments - his injuries are pretty fucking minor. At the same time, though, he’s just numb. Overwhelmed. Like he’s so oversensitized his brain has shut it all out, blunted every input. But breathing still hurts, so he doesn’t. His heartbeat feels dull and punishing against his ribs. Gerard takes a breath when he finally needs one, and he stands up.

James watches him. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. “Gerard…”

“It's my fault…” Gerard mumbles, taking a step forward. Every muscle in his body is stiff and corded with tension, like iron, remembering the way he’d latched onto James. James, who was trying to keep them all safe. He and James were standing right next to each other. It could’ve easily been him. If he hadn’t run after James, would they both be alive? “Shoulda been me…” he says bitterly. He takes another step forwards towards the door.

“Don’t fuckin’ say that, Gee. C’mon, we can still. Try to be okay. We’ll be okay, I’m still here, right?” It’s really fucking infuriating that James is having to comfort him. Gerard feels like a child. It’s his fault, and the person who’s dead because of him is still having to come to his rescue. James looks panicked. “At least we’re together, right?”

Gerard sits on that word. Together. It’s a twist of a knife into his side. He can’t be together with James. James is dead, and Gerard isn’t, but he can fix it. He _will_ fix it. He’ll make them be together. Gerard’s making his way down the hall, ignoring James for the time being. He shuts the bathroom door and locks it, then looks into the mirror over the sink. Gerard already sees a corpse in the reflection. He sneers. That same desensitized numbness coats over him, and he’s peeling off the aluminum backings from a blister pack of benadryl tablets by the time James comes in.

The door’s locked but James passes through it like it isn’t there. One of the few perks of being dead, apparently. But when he sees what Gerard’s doing, he rushes towards him. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing, Gerard stop it, stop it!” He tries to slap the pile of pink pills out from Gerard’s palm, but nothing happens. One of the many downfalls of being dead, apparently. Gerard’s fist clenches around the pills and he feels chilled to the bone where James’s hand passed through him, but he can deal with that.

“I’m fixing it.” James feels frigid every time he swipes at Gerard’s hand, but Gerard doesn’t let go of the pills. He looks down at his open palm. He lost count of how many there are but it’s enough that it’s hard to hold onto all of them. He turns the sink’s tap water on and hits his open mouth with his palmful of pills. He gags for a moment, before leaning down to the faucet to wash down the pills. He’ll fall asleep, he’ll wake up, he’ll be with James. Fixed.

“What the fuck, Gerard! Stop it, I - I’m not worth you fucking killing yourself for, for fuck’s sake, please!” He’s crying again, and he reaches for Gerard’s face like he wants to pry his jaws apart and force the pills back out of him. He gets a hand on Gerard’s mouth but phases through him completely, making them both flinch.

Gerard stumbles back and sits down with a thud, his back against the lip of the bathtub. He stares at James. He’s feeling it already, woozy and faint. He gives James a weak shrug, and a curls one corner of his lips into a sardonic smile.

“I don’t think it’ll take long,” he says.

James kneels down next to Gerard, trying for anything that’ll fix this. But no amount of tears or yelling or begging can stop what’s already happening. It doesn’t stop him from going on, though, fretful sobs littered between his words.

“Gee, please man, don’t die. You can’t do this, they need you. Mikey, Gee, he needs you. C-come on, don’t do this, Gee, I can’t -”

Gerard has the decency to feel a sting of guilt about leaving Mikey alone, about his parents and how they’re gonna find him like this. He hopes they’ll come to understand that it’s better this way.

James gives out another sob as Gerard closes his eyes. It feels the same as when he’s too stoned, a little queasy and very heavy, all his limbs like putty. He can hear James trying to stifle the sobs, shifting over to sit next to Gerard against the tub. Gerard opens his eyes as best he can, and watches James put a hand over Gerard’s shoulder, making it look almost like he’s touching him. He knows that he can’t, he won’t even try. James pulls away and hugs his legs, resting his cheek on his knees as they both watch Gerard’s breathing get slower and slower. Minutes tick by.

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, Gee…”

James buries his face into his knees and starts to cry again. Gerard knows he thinks he’s losing the only person who can still see him. He wishes he could make him understand that this way, they can be together. His tongue is heavy in his mouth when he tries to speak, and his eyelids won’t stay open for more than a few seconds at a time. His vision greys out, tunneling on the curve of James’s cheek where it’s pressed against his knee, and then his eyes won’t open, he can’t hear anymore. Everything goes quiet and dark.

Gerard is dead.

 

*

 

Gerard’s eyes open slowly, and he looks around. He’s still in the bathroom. James is next to him, and he’s still crying.

“Did it work?”

James looks up and at Gerard, eyes wide. He opens his mouth and just stares at him for a moment. And then he frowns and clenches his teeth to hold back a near-scream. James yells through his teeth.

“You fucking idiot! What the fuck! What the! Actual! Fuck! What the fuck were you thinking!”

Gerard rolls his eyes. Given James’s reaction he guesses he’s probably still in his body, still alive, somehow. Damn it. He pushes himself up off the ground and goes over to inspect the box of pills he had just taken. Gerard squints at the expiration date. Tossing the box to the ground, he grabs an unopened bottle of extra sleep aid cough and cold syrup. It’ll work this time, he knows it. It’s gotta. He tears off the plastic seal around the cap with his teeth.

“Those were three years expired. No wonder they didn’t work.” James doesn’t make any move to stop him as he uncaps the cough syrup and tilts the bottom of the bottle to the ceiling, chugging the ten ounces of sickly sweet medicine with little more than a crinkle of his nose. Gerard sits back down next to James and sticks his tongue out, shuddering. “Gross.”

James is shaking with anger. By whatever twist of fate, Gerard has survived half a gram of drugs in his bloodstream and now he’s doing the exact same thing over again. James doesn’t have to like it, Gerard thinks. It’s not like he can do anything about it. For a moment Gerard thinks James is resigned to it, is going to stop resisting, but his composure doesn’t last. James tries hitting Gerard, phasing slaps through Gerard’s body.

“You! Fucking! Idiot! You fucking idiot! What are you doing?! Gerard, come on! What the fuck!”

Gerard shudders as James keeps trying to touch him. He raises his shoulders and closes his eyes, ready for his proper and romantic suicide to actually work this time. He clears his throat. “That feels fuckin’ weird, man.” Gerard passes out faster than he did with the benadryl.

James hits at his own legs, giving another yell. “Where the _fuck_ are your parents?! Where’s fucking Mikey!? You fucking idiot! I wasn’t gonna make it past twenty-seven anyways, but you had a chance! You had a fucking chance, Gerard, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you?!” Gerard can barely hear him, like he’s yelling underwater. The words reach his ears in big, slow soap bubbles. They pop. They don’t matter. Darkness pulls him under.

 

*

 

This time, Gerard gulps in a deep breath of air as his eyes open wide, and he lurches forward. He tries to speak but his body convulses and he’s retching, dry, on his hands and knees on the floor. A thick cord of bile connects his lips to the tile floor and hangs for a moment, tense, before breaking and pooling under his mouth. When his stomach calms down he looks back to James, who looks more livid than shocked at this point. Gerard reaches over to try and touch James’ face, to see if he’s dead too. The hand goes right through James’ face, and Gerard pulls the hand back and smooths it over his own hair instead.

“What the fuck, I should definitely be dead.”

“You fucking listen to me, Gerard middle-name Way!” James points his finger in Gerard’s face, his own face flushed with anger and fear. “I don’t know why the fuck you’re not dying, but you need to stop fucking killing yourself!”

Gerard leans away from the finger. James looks very real, and his mind’s still a little fuzzy. Like waking up after a party, still kinda drunk. He frowns. “I dunno why I’m not dying either. But I gotta.” Yeah, he really feels drunk, or more like all he did was drink a bit of that sleep aid to get high. But that bottle was new, and he drank all of it, so he doesn’t get why he isn’t dead. He blinks hard, trying to clear his head.

James has beautiful hands. It’s sort of what attracted Gerard in the first place, the way his broad palms attached smoothly to his wrists, the way his fingers splayed out above the topography of his knuckles. He shakes his finger angrily at Gerard and all Gerard can think of is Matt Pryor at the Electric Lizard two weeks ago telling him to be careful because James is more fragile than he lets on, and that he was coming off a bad breakup.

Gerard watches the finger bob in his field of vision. He’s really feeling it now, the static strangeness of the medication pulling at him, only it’s not knocking him out. Fuckin’ worthless. James’s finger hovers in front of his nose, accusatory, and all he can think was that in life James had probably used that finger to curl under the chin of a lover, to entice from him a kiss.

_“Why_ do you need to die?!”

Gerard stares at him for a moment. “I should’ve, y’know, told you under happier circumstances, probably but. I really fuckin’ love you.” He sighs and stands up again, unsteady on his feet, before he unlocks and opens the bathroom door. He stumbles through the hall once more, groaning as he enters his mess of a room. Gerard opens the art supply drawer in his desk and pulls out his box of X-Acto blades. He wasn’t really a cutter as a teenager but he knew how to do it, how to make it stick. He pockets the blades and then crawls halfway under his bed, locating a half-empty bottle of vodka and tucking it under his arm before he makes his way back to the bathroom. He locks the door behind him.

“Hey! Hey! Gerard! Guess what?! If you really loved me, you wouldn’t fucking kill yourself again, because I’m fucking, begging you not to, right?!” His eyes go round at the sight of the blades in Gerard’s hand. “Is that a fucking knife!?”

James looks at the things that Gerard’s brought back and all the color drains from his face, and he shouts as Gerard goes to rummage through the medicine cabinet. Gerard frowns as he sees the bottle of prescription pills that he was given when he got his wisdom teeth removed. They made him queasy when he took them so he still had plenty left over. He struggles in opening the childproof cap and discards it when it comes free. He shakes the pills into his palm.

“Please, Gee… Don’t do this, I can’t fucking watch you do this again.”

Gerard claps his hand to his mouth. The pills taste chalky and sweet on his tongue, and he chases them with the vodka. “Then don’t. You don’t have to watch. But I‘m doing this for you.” He drinks again, not stopping until the bottle’s completely empty. His head’s spinning by the time he’s done, and his tongue feels numb. James is all fuzzy at the other end of his tunnel vision, and he falls to the floor. He fumbles the blades out of their box, and accidentally gashes his palm open trying to get a grip on one.

James turns his head away from Gerard as he digs the blade into his arm. When Gerard can’t hold back a soft, animal moan of pain, James yells to drown out the sound of it. He claps his hands over his ears and shouts nonsense syllables so he won’t have to hear what Gerard is doing. When the blade drops out of Gerard’s limp fingers, he knows he’s been thorough enough. The pills, the vodka… There’s blood puddling all around him. His arms are a highway map of gory red lines. Gerard tries to speak, and when James turns around he looks livid.

“Huh?! What was that!? I couldn’t hear you over the sound of your third fucking suicide attempt!”

Gerard takes a gasp for breath but he can’t hold it in. He coughs raggedly. “I mean… third time’s the charm, but uh…” He coughs again. “I said that I love you, James.” He gives a punchdrunk smile at James’ horror-stricken face. His eyes fall shut. It’s starting to feel familiar. “I meant it.”

 

*

 

James stands for a long time with his back to Gerard’s body. He doesn’t want to look at him. He knows all too well what he looks like by now. James has to brace himself before he turns around, and even so, he’s crying all over again as he sees Gerard’s bloody and mangled corpse. He’s lifeless this time, completely. The first two attempts haven’t prepared him at all for the blood, the froth of vomit around the corners of Gerard’s mouth. He hears the front door open and he’s filled with panic and dread and a horrible thread of hope. Maybe it’s not too late.

“Gerard…? You get home okay?” It’s Mikey calling out for Gerard, and James curses. He phases through the locked bathroom door and follows Mikey’s voice.

“Mikey! Mikey, you gotta be able to hear me, it’s important.” He swats his hands in and out through Mikey’s torso, trying to get any reaction. Mikey shivers and pulls his hoodie closer around himself. “Fucking Christ, dude! Notice me! I don’t care if you never hear me again, but just fucking hear me now! Mikey!”

Mikey shudders as James’s hand passes through his neck, and he looks around nervously. Like a dog sensing an earthquake, like he can _feel_ something wrong in the air. “Gerard?” he calls out again.

“BATHROOM! HE’S DYING!” James is screaming at the top of his lungs, every ounce of energy and passion put into trying to get Mikey to notice him.

“James.”

It’s sudden enough that James is momentarily speechless. Mikey’s peering around for him, confused. James gets with the program: “Yes! Okay, good! BATHROOM. Go to the bathroom! Come on dude, you can hear me!”

Mikey seems to be getting it, even if all he’s registering is a bad feeling. He makes his way towards Gerard’s room and looks in, calling his name. He goes down the hall and notices the shut bathroom door. Mikey tries to open it, and curses when he sees that it’s locked. He’s shoving his shoulder against the door, and then resorts to kicking below the handle. The door swings forward after a few more tries, and Mikey’s eyes widen in shock when he sees what’s on the other side.

Gerard is standing in his own pool of blood, looking himself up and down. He flinches as the door opens, and when he looks at Mikey it’s easy to tell their related, their faces are exactly the same. “Oh shit,” he says.

“What the _fuck_.”

James is behind Mikey, and he looks over at Gerard. “Dude, what the FUCK.” He also says, and Gerard looks at them both like they’re the ones who are inexplicably alive after three consecutive suicide attempts.

“I - I don’t fuckin’ know! I just - I just woke up again.”

Mikey raises a brow. “Again?” And Gerard winces. James just glares at Gerard. Mikey looks at the mess of the bathroom. The blood, the vomit, the empty bottles and boxes and wrappers, the blade. He prompts Gerard. “Again!? Gerard, what the fuck happened today?”

He sighs. When he looks up he’s not looking at Mikey, he’s just eyeing James guiltily from under the fringe of his hair. He frowns. “Stop fuckin’ glarin’ at me, dude.”

“You shut your goddamn mouth and tell Mikey what you fucking did!”

“How’m I gonna do that if my goddamn mouth’s shut?”

“This isn’t the time to be a fucking child, Gerard.”

Mikey clears his throat loudly. He’s looking at the space between Gerard and James, between what must look like - to him - Gerard and empty air. Gerard pushes both hands through his hair, out of his face, wincing at the dried blood that comes flaking off when he moves. “Fine. I’ll tell you everything.”

And he does, right there in the bathroom, taking a seat on the closed toilet. He keeps it truthful, because even if James can’t out him for lying, he doesn’t think he can sit there and spin falsehoods while James yells at him. Gerard lets out a deep breath once he’s finished with his story, and he looks over at Mikey. He seems to be dealing with it pretty well, but it might be the trademark Mikey Way pokerface. Gerard should be able to tell. He’s pissed that he can’t. Mikey nods slowly.

“You see ghosts… And you’re immortal.”

“Whoa, wait, no. That can’t be righ -”

“Gerard, you took half a gram of benadryl, four hundred milliliters of cough syrup, almost two weeks’ prescription of vicodin, half a bottle of vodka, and you slashed your arms open. You should be, like, turbo dead.”

He looks down, and shrugs a little bit. “I mean, maybe…”

“Not maybe. That storm did something to you, and now you can’t die.”

Gerard is quiet. He doesn’t want to look at Mikey, and he _can’t_ look at James with that revelation on the table, so he focuses on the tiles at his feet. They’re rust-colored and dirty now, Rorschach inkblot stains where he bled out. So that’s it, then. Gerard clears his throat, then bends over to pick up the trash from the ground.

“Better clean this up before mom gets home.” He gets to his feet. “I’m gonna just. Do that.”

Mikey and James watch Gerard for a moment, and Mikey nods. “Alright, bro. I love you, okay? I’ll go put some coffee on.” He steps forward and tugs Gerard into his arms, squeezing him as tightly as he can. Mikey isn’t demonstrative, not really, but he looks like he needs to do it as much as Gerard needs him to. “I really love you, Gee.” He lets Gerard go and turns away, and in a moment they can hear him clattering around the kitchen, the familiar sounds of him clumsily filling the coffee pot with water.

James watches Mikey leave, then turns his head to glare back at Gerard again. His gaze is relentless, and Gerard breaks eye contact first.

“Look, James -”

“No, shut the fuck up, Gee. I can’t _fucking_ believe you. I _begged_ you to stop.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter, apparently I can’t die anyways, so you’re fine.”

James stares at Gerard. He would look kinda goofy if he didn’t look so furious. _“I’m fine?_ I watch you kill yourself three times and rant about how it’s ‘for me’ and I’m _fine?”_ He gives a bitter laugh. “It does matter. I’m not fine. Fuck you.” He turns and starts to walk away.

Gerard can’t do anything about it, not really. He swallows. His spit feels thick, coated in cough syrup and vodka and vomit. James doesn’t turn around. “Where are you going? I’m the only one who can see you.”

“I don’t fuckin’ know, I’ll be a poltergeist or something. Anything’s better than being here right now.”

He leaves Gerard alone in the bathroom. He looks into the mirror, and sees more of a corpse than he did before. He digs the bleach out of the cabinet under the sink and pulls on a pair of rubber gloves.

Blood’s a bitch to get out of tile.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three nighttime vignettes. As always you can grab author Jess on tumblr @geeraymes and author Jay @swiss-army-romance. This one's a shortie but the next one will more than make up for it. Updates are on the 15th and 30th of the month. <3

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.  
-George Orwell, _1984_ (1949)

 

Lindsey wakes up to a whorl of light like the thumbprint of God hovering in the air over her, and it is so, so beautiful. Within it there are colors that seem unfamiliar, unimaginable, like when she tries to hang onto them they slip from her grasp. She can feel its glow on her skin not like light, or heat, but like breath, like some life force threading between it and her.

Then she blinks, and just like that, it’s gone.

“Well, that’s not good,” she says aloud, and rolls over onto her side, hunting for her cell phone. It’s not like they’ve set up a protocol, or anything, only they all saw Frank go up in flames that first day, and she’d heard about James being dead which was a gutpunch and a mystery in equal measure, what with Gerard carrying on like he was still right there. Maybe Gerard is just crazy, but she doesn’t think so.

It’s something more than that, for sure.

So she texts Jamia. She’s been doing that sort of a lot lately. _Are you up?_

She flips her phone closed and holds it against her chest like a warm, second heart. It takes a few minutes, but Jamia texts back: _sorta, you ok?_

Lindsey’s instincts tell her she isn’t overreacting, that whatever happened just now is something she shouldn’t keep to herself, but the clock on the front of her phone ticks over from 3:47AM to 3:48AM and she can’t believe she’s bothering a near stranger about this. And yet, Lindsey’s always given in to instinct. It’s earned her slightly more wins than losses, so. _Can I call you?_

Instead of texting back, Jamia calls, and her voice is husky and sleepy on the other end of the phone.

“What’s up?” she asks. God, she sounds like she’s still half-asleep. Lindsey has half a mind to just make something up.

“Sorry,” she says lamely. “I didn’t know who else to call, sort of.” Everything seems hard to quantify just then, maybe because it’s four in the morning or because Jamia makes her a little bit tongue tied on a good day. Probably it more has to do with the fact that there’s no problem, other than that she’s suspended in gaffa and a little on edge about it.

“Lyn,” Jamia says, and she sounds a little more with it. “Tell me what happened.”

“It sounds stupid,” Lindsey says. “I just… If whatever happened to us changed _all_ of us, I might’ve. I dunno, manifested it?” She laughs. “Or I’m hallucinating, or having like, a waking dream.”

“Why, what’d you see?”

This is what makes them different, Lindsey guesses, because where she would be in action already, Jamia is endless patience. It’s like she gets it, just instinctively, what anyone around her really needs. That’s the wall Lindsey is always butting up against. She has no clue.

“I don’t know how to describe it. It was all this, like… This crazy, dancing light, all around me. And I felt like…” She has to stop and laugh, because it’s not really funny but it just _sounds_ insane, the same way Frank walking around unscathed and on fire does. “It felt like it was connected to me, or like… I mean, more like it was an extension of me?”

They’re both quiet for a minute.

“Yeah, I don’t know what to do with that,” Jamia says finally. “You want me to come get you?”

That’s a whole other ball game. Calling Jamia in a fit of pique over a something that’s maybe nothing is one thing, getting her out of bed at four in the morning because she has a reliable car and a calming influence is quite another. And the thing is, Lindsey knows she wouldn’t offer if she wasn’t fully prepared to follow through, that that’s the kind of friend she is.

The thought makes her warm, and then it’s happening again, this odd, shapeless glow around her, the feeling of an extension of herself and, accompanying it, a kind of panic. She claws the phone back up to her face and hisses, “Not a hallucination!” and Jamia seems to know what she means, and what she needs, because she can hear her getting up and getting her keys and promising to be there soon.

By the time Jamia’s car pulls up the house is lit up like a Christmas tree. Lindsey’s hanging out of her open window, waiting, with the warm night air adrift around her and this _magic,_ for lack of a better word, all over the damn place. Jamia gets out of the car and looks up at her, and crosses the lawn, still awestruck.

“You’re too much,” she says around a smile. It’s quiet, she’s quiet in the way that Lindsey knows she’s talking just to her.

“You sound like my art teacher,” she replies.

“No, really, you’re too much - this is gonna wake up the neighborhood, come on.” Jamia jerks her head back at her car. Her long, dark hair flicks over her shoulder, burnished an odd copper-gold in the lights from whatever the hell is wrong with Lindsey.

She has a real fucking point.

Jamia’s still in pajama pants so Lindsey doesn’t bother changing, just throws a hoodie on and stuffs her cell phone and keys into the pocket. Getting out the door has never been much of a challenge at her house, and even when her hands are glowing, blurred by a radiance she can’t begin to understand, there are no real obstacles. She tumbles across the lawn and into the open passenger door of Jamia’s car and they’re off like a rocket ship, the strange light streaking out behind them.

 

*

 

Across town, Mikey’s up late. Or, later than usual. It’s always been easier to find peace and quiet when there’s nobody else around, and that goes doubly now, with Gerard, and with… Well. Everything, really.

There’s just no easy way to tell your friends you can hear their thoughts.

He can’t zero in so easily on anything when they’re all in a group, it’s like being in the world’s loudest bar, but when he’s alone, anybody near comes through loud and clear, five by five. He’s willfully drowning out Gerard’s half of a conversation with James right now.

And James, yeah, that’s weird. Mikey’s trying resolutely not to think about the day he came home to find Gerard three times dead and somehow still whole; that claws at him, it almost makes him _want_ to escape into somebody else’s thoughts because anything’s better than his own. But there’s one frayed edge of that afternoon that he can’t stop worrying at, picking at it like a scab or a paint blister.

He’d heard James.

He hasn’t since, and he doesn’t think he did before then, but something in that moment broke through the divide between wherever James is - the afterlife, he guesses - and Mikey’s suddenly extra-sensory brain. He’s worried James will figure it out, somehow, and tell Gerard, and that’ll be it.

It’s hard to tell your friends you can hear their thoughts, which is why Mikey hasn’t, and why he doesn’t intend to.

And that’s if he can even hang onto any of his friends. His head hurts just _thinking_ about being around them. After they’d come to, the day of the storm, and Frank had been on fire and all, he couldn’t even hear what was going on for the screaming. Even leaving the house these days makes his jaw ache from gritting his teeth against it, even with his headphones on. There’s no precedent for it, either. No thirty-day tutorial in how to tune out the entire goddamn state of New Jersey. He can barely sleep, and it’s a miracle everybody’s too wrapped up in their own shit to notice how much it’s showing on him.

There’s just nothing good that can come from this. Mikey’s not a genius, or anything, but he’s plenty smart enough to know that society is predicated on a tenuous framework of white lies and half-truths and sparing each other’s feelings, and he’s been robbed of that in one easy swipe.

There’s a difference between willful ignorance and self-preservation. It’s less distinct now.

When Frank had come at him still stinking of scorched cloth and burning hair his sincerity had beat against Mikey like a tire iron. They weren’t even distinct thoughts, just waves of concern and vulnerability and this sticky, genuine _caring_ that had dashed Mikey across the rocks before he could get his bearings. Frank wears his heart on his sleeve and before all this mess Mikey kinda liked it, kinda found that transparency refreshing. Now it feels too heavy, like when he’s around Frank he’s bearing the weight of every stray emotion that comes his way.

What do you do when being around the people you care about is an untenable burden? What do you do when isolating yourself makes you wonder if they cared about you in the first place? If you cared about them?

Mikey puts his pillow over his face and groans into it. Everybody’s asleep except Gerard, and James, he guesses, but they’re absorbed in each other, and there’s nothing they can do, besides.

He checks his phone, answers a couple of texts from people who don’t matter, who’re the only ones he can stomach talking to right now. His head fucking hurts. It’s too late to be awake but too close to morning for there to be any point in trying to sleep, if he could, anyway.

He wishes Gerard hadn’t wasted all the fucking Vicodin.

 

*

 

So James is back, which is new.

Gerard knows he hasn’t got much choice, if he wants to speak to anybody, so it’s not really surprising that he’s here, but still. Gerard is surprised. And he feels, all things considered, pretty crummy about how things went last time.

Which is why they’ve been staring each other down for the better part of a half hour, Gerard sitting hesitantly on the edge of his bed and James standing a few feet away, glowering. Despite the complicated knot of emotion he’s picking at, he’s glad to see James. Because what if he’d gone away furious and then… Ghosts don’t hang around forever, or at least, they don’t in any story Gerard’s ever read. They find some scrap of closure, whatever it is they need to move on, and then they’re gone. Gerard’s mom always told him “never go to bed angry” which, he’s pretty sure, translates here to “never ascend to the astral plane angry” or something like that.

“Okay, so…” Gerard starts, and James looks at him hard. “Like. I’m sorry.”

James looks so solid just then. It’s the way he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, cocks his hip out, folds his arms. He looks cocky and pissed off and Gerard’s mortified with how it makes him want to go belly up.

“I’m really fucking sorry,” he tries again. He is, is the thing. He doesn’t know how to make it count, though. It’s like the stakes are so impossibly high he can’t reach them, and so comedically low he could step over them. Nothing matters except that he wants it to.

“Gerard,” James says. He says it like he really means it, even though it’s just a name, even though he’s barely spoken since Gerard opened his bedroom door and found James waiting on the other side of it as though he had to be invited in. Maybe he did. Maybe that was a James thing now.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,” Gerard says earnestly. And then, because he can’t not, “I missed you.”

James crosses the room slowly. He picks his way around the detritus of Gerard’s life rather than through it - the crumpled pages of paper and the stacks of Bristol board and piles of laundry and fistfuls of pens and pencils and brushes on their last legs. There is something tender in the way he leaves space for Gerard’s everything, even when he doesn’t have to.

“I’m not…” James starts. He sits down next to Gerard on the bed and there’s the odd feeling that nothing’s changed, no dip in the mattress to tilt them together. “I can’t come back.”

“Okay,” Gerard says. It isn’t.

They sit like that for a long time, not really looking at each other, feigning being comfortable. Gerard picks an ink-stained hangnail. He needs all the courage he’s got for the next bit.

“About what I said,” he says. “When I… You know.”

James blinks at him. He looks so blasé. “That you love me?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

“I just…” Gerard looks down at his hands. They don’t look any different than James’s, not really - stubbier nails and that weird dry patch between the first and second fingers of his left hand that he can’t figure out how to get rid of, and they’re smaller, but they’re still hands. They look real. James looks real. He hates it. “I dunno, I just wanted you to know I meant it. Like, I may have gone a little overboard -” they both laugh because it’s so not funny - “but I did. I do.”

James makes the awkward gesture of patting Gerard’s knee without touching him, just bouncing his hand in the air. It doesn’t help at all, but it’s actually sorta funny, and once Gerard starts laughing he can’t stop until his chest aches and he needs to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” James tells him. “I loved me too.”

“Fucker,” Gerard says. He knows the bridge of his nose is wrinkling with a genuine smile, and it’s bittersweet that James still makes him happy like this, when everything’s so fucked up. The thing that gets him, really, is that James is laughing, showing that funny little gap between his front teeth and the dimple right in the middle of his cheek, and Gerard wants to kiss him, and he can’t. He never can.

Or. Well.

“Hold still,” he says, and shifts around so they’re facing each other on the bed. He leans in towards James.

“Careful,” James squawks. He flinches back when Gerard gets too close.

“I said _hold still.”_

It’s as close as he can get without risking clipping through James. His hands are on the bed on either side of James’s hips, holding him up while he leans in, maybe an inch away. With his eyes open it’s actually really uncomfortably close, but James doesn’t move again, and they hold there in tableau, all potential energy.

“Pretend I’m kissing you,” Gerard says, and he shuts his eyes. “I want to kiss you so just… I taste like pizza, me and Mikey went to Talula earlier and got pepperoni, so. I taste like that. And cigarettes. And that chapstick that we all pretend doesn’t have a flavor except it definitely does, and just -”

James hushes him, and then it’s just them and their breathing, and the ache blooming in Gerard’s arms from propping himself up the way he is, but he doesn’t want to stop. It’s unsatisfying as hell; it’s all they’ve got.

Gerard has to lean back when his arms start to shake from holding himself up. He opens his eyes and James is looking at him like… The way you’d watch a sinking ship from shore. There is too much, the air between where Gerard is and where James isn’t contains multitudes.

He feels like he’s grasping for straws even before he starts talking, but what else can he do? “You’re here, though,” he says. “I mean. For me, because of whatever happened, but like. Mikey heard you. Right?”

James shrugs. “I don’t know if he did or if he just… I mean, that kid’s the kwisatz haderach if anybody is. Trained in the weirding ways.”

Gerard grimaces. “Well...” he says, doubtfully. Maybe it makes more sense, even if he doesn’t want it to. “I guess so.”

And it’s fine. Or, it’s not, but everything that’s twisted up between them seems less dire, now. Gerard wishes he could hold James’s hand, not really for the romance of it, but because it seems like they could both use the general comfort. He doesn’t want to let go of the idea that there’s some part of James still accessible to the world, not just to him; something that’ll make it seem like James is more than a figment of his imagination. Something to suggest they could fix this, somehow, even though they can’t and they won’t and the sooner he comes to terms with it the better, for all of them.

“Gerard, I…”

Gerard waits and James doesn’t say anything else. The righteous anger he’d carried into the room has dissipated like so much steam, and he looks almost guilty, the way he’s avoiding Gerard’s eye.

“What is it?”

James shakes his head, like he’s not going to continue, but even as he does it he’s opening his mouth to speak. “I need a favor from you and it’s gonna be awkward for me to ask and for you to do it, but it’s like… Really fucking important, and I just.” James puts both palms over his face and pushes his hands up into his hair, taking in a deep, rushing breath through his nose. “If I could ask anybody else, dude, I would.”

That’s actually pretty fucking stressful. Gerard doesn’t think he’ll be any good at talking to James’s grieving family, or playing any pickup gigs with Matt in James’s absence, or anything. But whatever it is, Gerard’s all James has got, and all things considered he probably owes him one. Even a big one.

“When I like…” James starts. “When I found my body, I saw… Okay, it’s hard to describe but I saw Ray.”

Oh. None of them have seen Ray since the storm, so that’s...

“What do you mean?”

The look James gives Gerard pins him in place, it’s so serious. “He’s in trouble.” This is what James looks like when he’s pleading, Gerard realizes. “He just, he appeared out of thin air, and he found me, and he… He just vanished again. Whatever happened to us out there, it did something to him and I need you to… I need you to make sure he’s okay.”

He says that last part very quietly, almost apologetically.

Gerard nods. Of course he’s gonna do it. Of course he doesn’t want to, except for the way that he does. It’s James wanting it that makes him sure, ready to do anything he asks. It’s the quiet way that Ray had shaken his hand when they were first introduced to each other and how gentle and kind he’d been when they both had every right to dislike each other on principle.

“Yeah,” Gerard says. “Of course I will, man, I’ll. We’ll figure it out.”

The weight of exhaustion settles over Gerard then, like he’s been waiting to make things right with James before he can really rest. It’s late, even for him, and the sun rises early in the summer. Already the purple darkness of the sky outside looks less severe, less absolute than it did when James came in. He stands up and draws the curtains.

“Do you sleep?” he asks James.

James shakes his head. “I haven’t yet, so.”

“Will you lay down with me while I do?”

Instead of answering James moves to the far side of the bed, up against the wall, leaving space for Gerard. He turns onto his side and watches Gerard strip out of his jeans and get in beside him, pulling the sheet up to his chin. In the dim light they both look pearly and insubstantial. They could both be ghosts.

Gerard shuts his eyes and wills himself to sleep.

 

*

 

Lindsey’s having, quite frankly, a fucking blast. She and Jamia had taken the turnpike south and joined up with the Garden State parkway, and followed that for a little while until the comet’s tail of odd magic emanating from Lindsey began first to fade, then to disappear entirely in the still night air. Suitably cued, Jamia pulls off at the next exit, the Raritan purling out to the left of them, and parks on a side street down the road from one of those mile-long strip malls you get in central Jersey.

“So do you have any idea what it is?” Jamia asks. No preamble, no ‘how are you feeling,’ none of the stuff Lindsey doesn’t want to deal with.

“I mean,” she says. “Maybe? I have like… a hunch or two.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s gonna look really stupid if I can’t, but I sort of feel like I can control it,” Lindsey starts. “I mean, I can like, feel where it connects. To me.”

Jamia nods like _go ahead,_ and Lindsey must be pretty far gone on her because she’s raising her hands in the goofy approximation of a magician and willing the light out of them, her eyes screwed shut.

She doesn’t need to look to know it’s working. It takes her a minute to get it going, but then that strange warmth suffuses her and she can feel the nerves tingling in the tips of her fingers, and when she does look it’s none of the formless light she’d been producing before, against her will. Instead the object shimmering between her raised hands looks real, looks exactly as though she’d plucked it up off the ground, except for the fact that it’s floating: it’s a single, long-stemmed calla lily, hovering there in the closed cab of Jamia’s ancient Volkswagon.

“Cool,” Jamia says under her breath, and just like that, the lily dissolves in front of them like wet candy floss.

For a moment they just sit there, stunned.

“Why a lily?” Jamia asks. “I mean, that’s a little… funereal, don’t you think?”

“I like them,” Lindsey replies. She’s distracted. She can still feel the radiant hum of it coursing through her, can almost fit her hands around it, like a solid thing, except… She can’t quite hold it together, can’t conjure something purely of her own imagination and make it stick.

“What else can you do?” The look Jamia gives her just then is so… It’s studious without being the least bit clinical, all warm and impressed and fascinated. Maybe, underneath all that, a little bit scared. She’s stung pale in the predawn light.

“I don’t know,” Lindsey says. “Let me try something.” She hunts through her hoodie pockets until she finds a balled up receipt and smooths it out against her thigh. And she concentrates.

It’s easier now that she has an object to focus on, something onto which she can project this strange energy. She shuts her eyes and feels the paper under her fingertips and the warm glow of the energy rushing out of them, imbuing the paper with purpose.

Jamia whispers _“Lindsey,”_ and that’s how she knows she’s done it. She opens her eyes and there under her hand is a crisp twenty-dollar bill. She can’t help but grin.

Jamia plucks the bill up out of Lindsey’s lap and examines it, turns it over and looks at it from every angle. “Limitless unknowable power and your first instinct is to counterfeit money?” She laughs. “Gerard was wrong about us being superheroes.”

“Hey, to be fair my first instinct was to make flowers,” Lindsey says. She watches Jamia hold the bill up into the light from a nearby streetlamp, how the elegant line of her throat curves as she tilts her head, and the bill is suddenly gone, changed back to a wrinkled receipt in Jamia’s hand.

Jamia tilts her head questioningly to the side.

“Lost my, uh… My concentration,” Lindsey explains lamely.

“Mmhmm,” Jamia says. If Lindsey didn’t know better she’d say Jamia was smirking. “So it’s not like a permanent change? You have to keep, I don’t know, thinking about it?”

Lindsey shrugs. “I guess. I mean, it’s like I’m putting part of my, my energy or whatever, outside myself. If I don’t keep pushing it out there it just comes back to me? I don’t really understand it yet.”

“It’s like… Illusions, then. I mean real ones.” Jamia has her shoulders hunched up in a sort of permanent shrug, peering at Lindsey, trying to understand. “That’s so cool.”

“I mean I guess I’d rather do this than catch on fire all the time.”

They both laugh.

“It kinda suits him, y’know?” Jamia says. “People always say Frankie’s got an explosive personality.”

There’s no arguing with that. “So what does that say about me?” Lindsey asks, before she can stop herself.

“What do you mean?”

“Well if Frank’s all about burning things up, metaphorically speaking, and now that’s literal… I mean, illusions?” She laughs to cover up what she doesn’t want to believe. “Is this some cosmic way of the universe telling me I’m fake?”

Jamia frowns at her in a way that clearly says _stop being stupid._ “Nah, dude, it’s because you’re. Y’know. An artist.”

“You think?”

“I _know._ I saw your piece over I-95, dude. That’s guts.”

Lindsey wills herself not to get flustered the way she always does when people who matter say anything nice about her work, and then she has to stop herself getting flustered over the subconscious categorization of Jamia as _people who matter._

“I’m just saying,” Jamia continues. “It’s not a punishment from the universe, I don’t think. It’s like a confirmation of what your strengths are.”

“What about you?”

Jamia looks, for the first time, like she doesn’t know what Lindsey wants her to say. “I… What about me?”

“What are your strengths?”

She thinks about it for a long moment. Lindsey is aware, just then, of how alone they are, them and the early morning fireflies skirting the edges of the Raritan.

“I guess I don’t know,” Jamia says finally. “I mean, I don’t have a power, so. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your strengths falling under the mundane.”

Which is fair, but Lindsey doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want to feel like she and Jamia are on different sides of a gap. She wants to tell Jamia that, power or not, she’s anything but mundane. That sounds melodramatic, though, even in her head, so instead she says, “Let’s get something to eat.”

There are diners around, but that feels too intimate, and there’s the fluorescent beacon of a McDonald’s beckoning to them from the other side of a near-empty strip mall parking lot just down the road. They idle in the drive-thru for a solid five minutes before it becomes apparent that there’s nobody on the other end of the speaker, and Jamia reverses out and pulls in up front so they can order inside.

Jamia unbuckles her seatbelt but doesn’t open her door. She’s patting her pockets, maybe looking for cigarettes. She bends forward to dig through the ashtray under the busted-looking tape deck, her hair parting in two heavy curtains over the back of her slender neck. She emerges a moment later with a wadded up fiver and hands it to Lindsey.

“I didn’t think to bring my wallet,” Jamia explains. “You want to put your skills to the real test?”

For a minute Lindsey is shocked. Jamia advocating petty theft? And then she remembers, right, they met in the same court-mandated community service program. Right.

“You know you hide that criminal penchant well,” Lindsey says, taking the bill from her. “It’s cute.”

Inside it’s all fluorescents and the dregs of enthusiasm from the graveyard shift. Inside Lindsey can see how tired Jamia looks, how messy they both are in their pajamas an hour’s drive from home. They get egg sandwiches (Jamia insists three times that they withhold meat from hers) and a truly lethal number of hash browns (seven) and two enormous cups of mediocre coffee with too much sugar. Lindsey hands over the five only now it’s a twenty, and she wills it to hold its shape until the register drawer is shut and they’re out the front door, grinning.

They eat in the car with the radio on and turned low and the windows open. Jamia only has two stations programmed into the presets of her junked up stereo, NPR and the one local shitty punk station that barely covers Bergen county, so they listen to the morning news murmuring away and talk about… Well, everything. The sun rises and washes the strip mall in its flat slant of light, and out east somewhere the ocean is roiling and above her the sky is a lemon verbena impressionist smudge, colors running everywhere, chalk in a rainstorm.

On the drive back Lindsey leans over the gearshift to clumsily feed Jamia the last hash brown, by request. She watches the sky out in front of them change from the pale color of dawn to a violent, unapologetic cyan, unbroken by clouds, relentless. They cross back into Bergen county and pick up a rerun of _Live or Cry Trying,_ and they yell along with the songs they know, and make up words to the ones they don’t.

When Jamia pulls up in front of Lindsey’s parents’ house, it feels like days have passed. How could she have been so hesitant, so unsure of whether to call Jamia or not? She wants to say thank you, but that wouldn’t mean quite what she wants it to.

Lindsey opens the front door and then turns around on the threshold to wave until Jamia’s car is out of sight. She goes up to her room and gets back into bed, where the sheets are still rumpled from earlier. There are things to think about, things like the illusionist she’s become and the implications of _all that,_ but she puts them aside and tries to remember being with Jamia, not even an hour before, and the way her smile had lit the empty freeway just so, and how she had to tuck her hair behind her ear over and over again because every time she laughed her shoulder shook it loose.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Little late this time around, lads, the seasonal depression has hit us hard. Still, here's a whole shitton of backstory - this chapter contains no major trigger warnings but it's the first instance you'll see in Sowing Season of like... a sex scene. Sorry. 
> 
> As always, you can grab author Jess on tumblr @geeraymes or author Jay @swiss-army-romance. Thanks for reading! Have a happy holiday, whatever you celebrate!

“I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.”  
-Aldous Huxley, _Brave New World_ (1932)

 

When Gerard turns up at the rec center the next day everybody else is already there, except Ray. This task James has set him seems impossible - how’s he supposed to find him if he’s… What, invisible? If he’s vanished into the ethereal plane until the next round of combat?

They’re all loitering outside, more quiet these days than they were at first. Even Frank’s frequent and noisy attempts to make conversation have a stillborn quality to them. Gerard looks out across the field, dead grass and gravel and scrubby little trees, and there’s… He blinks, and there’s nothing, but he could’ve sworn he say the dandelion halo of Ray’s head and the solid rest of him lingering near a juniper tree.

It’s too much time with James, probably. They’ve been talking around Ray more than about him, but both of them want to find him, to make sure he’s alright. It’s been days.

Gerard watches the place where the Ray-shaped mirage appeared, and it stays resolutely empty. Then, closer in, he sees him again. Just a blip, the flickering afterimage of a bright light, but he can’t be imagining it, can he? Gerard gets up and walks out into the center of the field, and nobody tries to stop him.

“Ray?” he says. “Ray, are you there?”

No response. Well, that doesn’t preclude his existence, Gerard guesses. He sits down in the grass with his legs out in front of him and leans back on his palms, puts his gaze somewhere out in the depths of that expanse of cyan New Jersey sky.

“Well, just in case you are there,” he continues. “I don’t know what happened to you but, for what it’s worth, I think something happened to all of us. Listen, Lindsey can make these… Illusions, I guess you’d call them. Frank caught on fire and it didn’t burn him, he can sort of control it but he’s still really shitty at it.” He laughs. There’s still no sign of Ray but he keeps going. “It’d be great if you could, I don’t know, be around for it. We’re all having a great time laughing at him.”

There’s nothing, still. A breeze stirs the crabgrass.

“Look I’m just gonna keep talking until I have to go inside, okay?” Gerard says. “I mean I’m probably not, like, the person you want to hear from right now but James asked me to help you so.” Maybe Gerard’s imagining it but it seems like the air out in front of him ripples, the way you’d see heat come up off the cement from far away. “He misses you, y’know. He said you know he’s… Well. He’s dead, Ray, and I have a feeling you and me probably feel the same kind of, just, gut-wrenchingly awful about that.”

“Yeah.” It’s Ray’s voice, that strange, soft, musical cadence. It comes from nothing, from some spot in front of and to the left of where Gerard’s sitting.

“Ray?” Gerard says, disbelieving. There’s no answer, but he knows what he heard. “Hey, Ray, I fuckin’ care about you, okay? I know I don’t really know you but you’re James’s favorite person in, like, the _entire world_ and you seem like somebody worth knowing.”

That heat ripple is back only it’s distinctly person-shaped, catching the light in its strange contours. Gerard scrambles to his feet and moves towards it, this thing that he’s praying is _Ray._

“Ray, is that you? Ray, please.” He feels like he has to keep talking, like if he stops he’ll lose this glimmer of hope. He reaches his hand out and feels a bizarre heat underneath his palm. He presses forward and something pushes back, and against any lingering self-preservation instincts Gerard had before he was immortal, he wraps both arms around this Ray-shaped rift in space and holds onto it as tightly as he can.

When he steps back Ray’s there looking sheepish, squinting into the sun.

“I haven’t quite figured it all out yet,” he tells Gerard. “It only really happens when I come here, I get… I dunno, close to where we all got whammied and I just disappear.”

“Fuck, dude, why didn’t you tell us? We’ve been worried!” Gerard wants to hug him again, wants to do it on James’s behalf. He wants to remind himself that their losses to the storm are enormous but they’re not as bad as they could be.

Ray stares at him. “I only have James’s number,” he says.

Right.

The walk back to the rec center is awkward but Ray keeps his shape through it, and Gerard programs his cell number and Mikey’s into Ray’s phone. “Just in case,” he says, handing it back.

It’s a piece falling into place, almost. It’s a thread woven back into whatever tapestry fate is weaving for them. Gerard pats Ray on the shoulder and they head over to the rest of the group.

 

*

 

"Alright, you fine citizens." The way Mark says it seriously skeeves Jamia out. He knows what they are - or, he knows they’re all some flavor of petty criminal, at least. Probably better to keep the other thing secret. He continues: "Today you're gonna give back to the community by picking up litter in the park." Trash grabbers and garbage bags are distributed between everyone, and Mark gives  a two finger salute before heading back into the rec center. Even he’s been off since the storm. Jamia remembers that he and James were kind of friends. The ripples one person can make by their presence, their absence.

Jamia groans. "It’s too fucking hot for this," she says to Frank, but she shakes her garbage bag open anyways. Everyone makes their way out to the park on the other side of the rec center. It's pretty gross, with all the trash people just throw on the ground. They keep in a loose clump, all of them reluctantly spearing the bigger pieces of litter, making little progress.

"So like..." Frank sniffs. "How are we gonna be super heroes?" He looks between everyone.

"Excuse me, what?" Lindsey cocks an eyebrow at him. None of them besides Jamia have seen her use her powers yet; since that night she’s been doing a great job pretending they aren’t there.

"Like, we've all got super powers now!" He winces as half the group shushes him, and continues in a softer tone. "We gotta like, make good with it. Use our powers for noble deeds."

"You're asking a group of aimless hooligans to spontaneously grow better moral compasses so that they can become super heroes." Lindsey’s tone is calm, she’s not even looking at Frank anymore. She nudges an empty beer bottle into her trash bag with the toe of her shoe.

"Are you saying you're gonna use your powers for bad?" Frank asks, and Jamia can hear the rising heat in his tone. She steps over towards him, but Mikey’s words beats her to the punch.

"I’m sure that’s not what she’s saying," Mikey assures Frank, and Lindsey scoffs.

"I’m not interested in having powers, good or bad." She rolls her eyes at Mikey. “And what I do with them is none of your business, kid.”

Gerard turns like he's just entered the conversation. He frowns at Lindsey. "Hey, that 'kid' is my brother, so why don't you leave him alone." In that weird way tic he’s developed which lets them all know James has materialized, Gerard’s glance snaps back over his shoulder. "Yeah, neither are you." He mutters.

Lindsey clicks her tongue. “Whatever." She replies, giving Mikey a glare before turning away from him.

Jamia swallows. She likes Frank and Lindsey. Picking sides isn't exactly her forte. She clears her throat, and speaks. "I don't think we even have a pitch for a team, like..." She looks between everyone, and shrugs again. "Me and Mikey don’t even have powers, and the others aren’t particularly, uh, offensive, let's say."

"No way!" Frank protests, picking up a half-empty coffee cup and shoving it aggressively into his trash bag. "Lynz, you can make wicked illusions and mess with them. When he figures out how to control it Ray can go invisible and like, judo chop someone from behind. I can fuckin' explode, for Christ's sake."

Lindsey huffs out a sigh. "Alright, what about Gerard, Mikey, and Jamia. Are they just, not in the group?" She asks.

"Well like, Mikey’s super smart, in general, I guess. And Gerard is like, immortal? So he could just beat people up and not die."

"Gerard can't fight," Mikey corrects Frank, and they all start to hug the curve of the park's lake, picking up litter as they go.

"He can learn? Also like, he can't die. We could use him as a lure, and -"

"Gerard's not bait," Ray says firmly, and everyone looks at him. It’s weird, Jamia thinks, that even when he’s not technically invisible, he still manages to blend into the background. Ray clears his throat. "He isn't expendable," he clarifies, his tone softer than before.

"And Jamia's still not involved in your group," Lindsey says, darting a glance at Jamia. She has a feeling they’re both thinking of their conversation in Jamia’s car a few nights ago, and she blushes at the memory.

Frank groans. "Man, if only James got a cool power. Too bad he had to fuckin' croak on us."

"Hey, shut the fuck up, man, he's -" Gerard's cut off by Ray, who's dropped his bag and grabber, and is marching right up to Frank.

"You don't get to talk about him like that. You don't even get to think about him like that, you hear me?" His voice is shaking, but he holds his ground. Ray prods his index finger into Frank's chest and pushes at him as menacingly as he can, which isn't very.

Frank scoffs, shaking his head at Ray's attempt to be taken seriously. Frank can be such a jerk when he knows he can get a reaction out of somebody. Jamia steps closer to them, ready to tell Frank off if somebody has to.

Frank chuckles. "Listen dude, I was kidding. Learn to take a fuckin' joke."

"You don't get to joke about that!" Ray pitches forward, ready to shove Frank in the chest with both hands, and it’s one of those moments where gravity and the breeze off the lake and everyone around seem to slow down. Jamia can feel herself yelling for them to stop, can see her own hands come up to catch Ray by the wrist. She gasps and her eyes widen as skin touches skin, and she stiffens. All of a sudden she can feel the world rushing into her, through her, the heat death of a star in her chest. In the millisecond after she touches Ray she feels a dozen baseless emotions, none she can get a firm grip on, shorting her brain out entirely. Her gaze locks on Ray's as her vision blacks out from the outside in.

Darkness.

 

*

 

_September 2005_

Ray met James on a Tuesday afternoon in a Guitar Center, because Ray was unlucky and the universe liked to dump on him while he was at work. He tugged at the collar of his corporate-mandated polo shirt, which itched no matter how much fabric softener he used, and went over to the display of MicroKorgs to try to help him out.

“We have one set up if you wanna try it out,” he said, and James startled, pushing back from the display case with a broad palm. His nails were blacked out in Sharpie. He had a dozen cheap rubber bracelets on one wrist and two neat rows of tattoos up the centers of both his forearms, which would be sort of hot if Ray didn’t know kanji tattoos were lame.

He had the sincere sort of grin that made Ray’s stomach turn over, like a car engine, just once. Clunk.

“If you’re working for commission don’t bother, I don’t have the money for one of these,” James said. “If you came over because you think I’m cute, though… You can show me the display model.” He winked and his smile didn’t falter and Ray couldn’t tell if he was being made fun of or not, but the store was in a lull so he showed him over to the keyboard display anyway.

“I’m, uh, I work in guitars so I don’t have all the features memorized but I think it’s supposed to be pretty intuitive,” Ray said. He flipped the on switch at the back of the MicroKorg and stood back.

Usually people got nervous trying out instruments - they’d show off and fuck up, or they’d play something painfully simple just to test the settings, or they’d pull out a selection that everybody knows to try to prove their merit. Ray couldn’t count how many Stairways to Heaven he had to endure in an average day. James at the keys was different, though. He relaxed into it immediately, testing the weight of the keys with a series of arpeggios up and down the keyboard before falling into a lazy pattern of jazz chords with his left hand.

He turned to look at Ray over his shoulder, not losing the rhythm of the chords. “What’s your name?”

“Oh.” Ray looked down at his name badge, momentarily bewildered. “Ray.” He tapped the badge.

“Cool.” James turned back to the keyboard and improvised a little melody over the top of it, simple but fresh. He leaned over the keyboard like he was facing an audience, putting his mouth up against an invisible mic. “This one’s for Ray at the Paramus Guitar Center,” he said, and even from behind him Ray could tell he was smiling.

What he was playing was hard to pin down - it started with broad jazzy chords and evolved into something synth-poppy and danceable before hurtling through a series of key changes and modulations that made Ray’s head spin. He landed on an odd cadence and resolved it with a glissando down the keys and then a fat, rolled chord.

“It’s a really nice piece of equipment,” James said when he turned around.

“Yeah.” Ray felt, for reasons he wasn’t particularly ready to articulate, a little bit breathless.

“I can’t afford it.”

“I’d let you steal it if I didn’t need this job.”

They both laughed at that.

“How about…” James turned back to the Korg and played a flutter of synthy notes before reaching over it to turn it off. “We split the difference and you give me your phone number instead?”

Ray could feel himself blushing. He did it easily and often and he hated it. “You know it’s rude to ask somebody out at work, right?”

“Who says I’m asking you out?” James looked a little bit smug and maybe a little bit nervous, or Ray was just hoping he was. “We could jam. Sometimes I need a guitar player.”

“Oh.” Ray felt curiously disappointed, even as he felt around in his pocket for a post-it to write his number down.

“I mean, I’m not like… precluding the possibility of asking you out eventually,” James said. He looked up at Ray through his lashes, definitely smug this time. “I just like to take my time.”

Ray held the post-it out to him, feeling wrongfooted and stupid and giddy. “I don’t even know your name.”

James took the note from him, deliberately touching his hand with the pad of his thumb. “James. I’ll call you.”

“You probably say that to all the Guitar Center sales associates,” Ray joked.

James winked and didn’t say anything, but Ray caught him looking back over his shoulder as he left the store.

Ray reorganized the entire acoustic display and was still blushing at the end of it.

_October 2005_

Ray had his first date with James on a Thursday night a couple of weeks later, only he wasn’t sure if it was a date or just hanging out. There was a show at the Loop Lounge that some of James’s buddies were playing, and James wanted to go and he called Ray, because he was a bad texter, apparently, and asked if Ray wanted to come out, and if so, could he pick him up around seven.

Ray had said sure and spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what to wear because he was a parody of a teen movie girl, or something. He and James actually had jammed a few times, and spent a lot of the inbetween time drinking beer and talking and eating pizza and talking. Ray learned that James had moved to Jersey City from Missouri when he was ten, and that he had an older brother he cryptically only referred to as “Smack” and that despite not being from New Jersey he was a thousand times more well-connected than Ray, a Kearny native, was. He learned that James also played the drums, and that he’d gone to conservatory for two years as a percussionist before dropping out, and how he was teaching drums and piano out of his garage to get by.

In turn, he’d told James about how he’d gotten into playing guitar by borrowing Lou’s when he wasn’t around, and about how he’d done a couple courses at community college but it wasn’t for him, and how that just about broke his mom’s heart. He told James about his coworkers at the Guitar Center, most of whom were pizza-faced teenagers with Pink Floyd obsessions but all of whom meant well. He told James he was looking for gigs as a guitarist - something he’d scarcely admitted to himself, even while he was hitting up the classifieds in the Aquarian for audition times he’d never talk himself into going to.

“You should just do it,” James had said, laying sideways across his bed with his legs propped up on the wall. “You’re really good, Ray.”

And Ray had made a noncommittal noise because he knew he was good but hearing James say it still made him feel pleasantly queasy.

“I’ll bring you around to meet some of the guys, they’re always having like. Drama that results in lineup changes that result in terrible things like me playing guitar. They’ll be all over you.” And he had paused and smiled a halfway smile, just one side of his mouth quirked up and dimpling his cheek. “Not too all over you, I hope.”

So maybe it was a date, or maybe James was introducing him to the best of the Jersey underground scene, but either way Ray needed to wear something that would make him look both cool and potentially sexy, and his hoard of holey black t-shirts was going to produce something appropriate if it took all goddamn day.

James picked him up at seven. He drove a pickup truck the exact, mottled reddish-brown color of a roasted peanut. They parked a few streets down from the Loop and walked over together.

“How many times did you change out of that shirt before deciding it was good enough?”

“Why, is it wrinkled?” Ray looked down at himself and smoothed his t-shirt down. When he looked up, James was laughing.

“No, it’s just…” James pressed his lips together. “It’s just you.”

He took Ray by the elbow and steered him into the club.

“We’re on the list,” he told the bouncer.

“Come on, Dewees, you’re always on the list, can’t you pay to get in like one time?”

Ray reached for his wallet but James grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, man, you’re making me look like a tool in front of _Ray.”_ He said it with significance.  

Ray didn’t know quite what that was supposed to mean, but the bouncer laughed and stood aside for them and James pulled Ray into the club. It was dark and humid even though outside it had been cool, and James wrapped his arm around Ray’s waist to keep him close in the press of the crowd. They emerged on the other side of the venue where the first band was setting up, and James dutifully introduced Ray around to his friends.

“We’ve heard a lot about you,” said a guy whose name Ray didn’t catch. “James talked you up.”

“You didn’t,” Ray groaned, turning to James and seeing him grin devilishly.

“Only true things.” James was easy with the crowd at his back and the band in front of him, talking gear and gossip and upcoming shows. He kept one hand on the back of Ray’s arm and squeezed every few minutes like he was letting him know he was still there.

Ray made awkward attempts at conversation with one of the guys, who seemed perfectly nice but who could scarcely be heard over the Descendents pumping over the PA. Eventually James curled his hand around Ray’s arm and pulled him away so the band could finish setting up.

“You’re a hit already,” he told Ray.

“I don’t remember any of their names,” Ray said honestly.

“You don’t have to.” James cocked his head to the side. “Just remember mine.”

They stood close, perilous, with James keeping his hands anchored on Ray, one at his waist and the other on his arm. Ray wondered if they were going to kiss, now, or ever. He wanted to.

They didn’t that night. They watched the band, and then stayed for the next three, and then James drove Ray home and walked him up to his stoop and it felt courtly, almost old-fashioned, the way James kept a hand on Ray’s back and looked at him while they stood haloed by the half-dead porchlight. Ray licked his lips. He wanted to kiss him.

“Thanks for taking me out, I had a really good time,” he said.

“Me too.” James’s mouth was tempting, quirked in his odd smile. “I’d like to do it again sometime.”

The six inches between them smoldered in the cool October air. “That sounds like fun,” Ray said, and he could hear how nervous he sounded. He wanted to kiss James. He was burning with the weight of the want.

“Next time I’ll take you someplace I have to pay to get you in, and you’ll know it’s a date for real.” James leaned up and looked at Ray with his intense eyes, one brow raised.

_This is it,_ Ray thought, _he’s going to kiss me._ He focused on relaxing his mouth, trying to make himself look tempting and not stupid, which was a losing game, but it was worth a shot.

“I’ll call you,” James said, and turned to walk back to his truck.

Ray watched him get into the cab and wave, and he leaned against the door of his building and watched James’s taillights disappear around the corner. He put a hand to his mouth.

*

The first time James kissed Ray was the next day, when Ray took the bus all the way out to his house in the middle of the afternoon.

Smack answered the door. Ray still didn’t know his real name.

“James! Door!” Smack shouted, and left Ray standing in the doorway alone.

“Ray?” James said, stumbling down the stairs, still in pajama pants and no shirt. “We didn’t have plans, right?”

“Did I fuck it up?” Ray asked.

“What?”

“Last night, when you walked me to my door, and you… And we… Did I fuck it up?” Ray couldn’t stop fidgeting with his fingers so he shoved both hands in his jeans pockets.

“I thought we had fun,” James said slowly.

“We did,” Ray said. Why wasn’t James getting it?

“So…” James pushed his hair out of his face. “What’s the problem, then?”

Ray huffed out a frustrated breath. “You didn’t kiss me.”

James blinked. “Oh. Did you want me to?”

“I was sort of, like, waiting for you to,” Ray admitted. “It’s stupid, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I came all the way out here I just - “

“Ray.” James was looking at him with both of his eyebrows raised and his mouth taut like he was trying not to laugh. “Sometimes if you want someone to kiss you, you have to take matters into your own hands.”

“Oh.” Ray leaned back to look at James more clearly. “Okay.” He put one hand on James’s bare hip and the other on the side of his neck, and when he leaned in he could feel more than hear James laughing.

They kissed. They kissed for a long time.

“Okay,” Ray said when he pulled away for breath. “Okay, I have to go to work.”

“If you can wait like ten minutes I’ll drive you.” James smiled and pulled out of Ray’s hands and left him standing in the doorway again while he got dressed. He came back down barefoot in a pair of ripped up jeans and a Yes t-shirt that Ray made fun of him for during the entire drive to the strip mall where Ray worked.

“Pff, it’s Rick Wakeman, dude,” James said. “See if I ever give you a ride anywhere again.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ray waited until James had put the car in park, and then looked at him. He was waiting, he realised, to be kissed.

“Remember that thing I told you?” James said. He smiled indulgently and leaned across the center console to kiss Ray.

“I’ll work on it.” For good measure he leaned over to grab James by the collar of his stupid prog rock t-shirt and kiss him again. “Promise.”

_December 2005_

The first time Ray slept with James it was at a party, which both of them sort of regretted. It wasn’t anything about the two of them, the way they were together… More like, James didn’t want to let Ray get out of bed for a whole day afterwards, and Ray was of much the same mind, except there were forty drunk friends of James’s outside the door putting a damper on the mood.

They had been… Dating? They had been seeing each other for a few weeks. They had, honestly, mostly been hanging out the same way they had before, with the jamming and the beer and the pizza, but some of the time Ray would be getting worked up about something at work, or some show he’d been to where a hack had played nothing but power chords to rousing applause, and James would smile fondly and lean over and kiss him. They’d been to a couple more shows together, and while James was always very attentive to what Ray had to say, Ray found himself hard-pressed to venture past the periphery of the conversation, never quite inserting himself into James’s circle of friends.

It had been intoxicating to watch him there in his element as much as it had been alienating. Ray hovered close by him and listened to him making everybody laugh and felt inadequate in every way he possibly could. Then James had driven him home and cradled his jaw in one palm while he kissed him and said, “You should talk more. You have things to say.”

So when he’d invited Ray to a house party Ray had expected lots of gentle prodding in the direction of conversations with strangers, and he’d agreed to it anyway because it was James asking. But James had picked him up and things had been electric between them, right from the start. There was no slow burn, like usual - James had grabbed his hand across the console of the truck and held onto it and Ray had felt warm all over.

This was a coast they had been skirting for a couple of weeks, making tangents to the idea of having sex. They had not been entirely chaste. Ray still blushed remembering the way James had driven them out to the factory part of town and parked at the edge of a broad lot. They’d turned the radio up and laid in the bed of the truck together, watching the stars beyond a veil of industrial pollution, and James had leaned up on one elbow and kissed Ray very softly.

He pulled back and traced the shape of Ray’s lips with his thumb, then kissed his forehead and his cheek. He leaned down to kiss Ray’s neck and the ridge of his collarbone under the neck of his t-shirt. It was October, and the edges of the parking lot were brocaded with orange leaves, blown in on a breeze. James pushed his hand up under Ray’s t-shirt and settled it in the dip of his sternum, and kissed him everywhere: his wrists and hands, his neck, his chest and stomach, the crest of his hipbone. Then James had jerked him off with unparalleled enthusiasm, and in the cool October night Ray had rolled him onto his back and returned the favor.

So it wasn’t new. Ray wanted to sleep with James, and because he was exactly himself, James was being slow and deliberate with it. The last place Ray expected it to happen was spontaneously, in the home of some friend of a friend, but all night long they’d playing a game of touches and glances, like teenagers. Like they couldn’t admit to themselves what they both wanted, or believe that it was possible to have it.

Finally, James had tugged Ray into an unoccupied bedroom, locked the door, and said, “Ray,” in breathless voice.

“What?”

“I want…” Even in the dim light Ray could see James’s eyebrows draw together. “What do you want me to do?”

That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Because James looked half-wrecked already, chewing on his lip, looking like he was struggling with the effort of not toppling Ray onto the bed and pinning him there with kisses. James wanted Ray to want it.

“I want…” Ray started, and didn’t know how to finish. He couldn’t ask for this, even with James looking like he was ready to lasso the moon for him. “I just.” He turned his face to the floor. He couldn’t possibly look at James and say this out loud. He felt hot all over. “I want you.”

“Ray,” James said again, only this time he sounded sad, maybe wistful. He stepped forward and put his hands on the sides of Ray’s face, cupping his jaw, turning his head up so they were eye to eye. “Anything you want.”

Ray shut his eyes. “I want you to fuck me.”

He could feel James’s smile when he kissed him. “Are you sure?” he asked, and Ray nodded against his kiss. James did tumble him down, then, onto somebody’s unmade bed. He undressed him and touched him with careful hands, like Ray was breakable. He kissed Ray’s chest, sucked a hickey into his shoulder, and held him close for a while, just kissing him softly. He put one arm over the edge of the bed and fished his jeans out of the pile of their clothes, found his wallet, and located in it a sachet of sex club lube and a backup condom.

James bore him down into the pillows and scraped the palm of his hand up Ray’s thigh. “Is this alright?” he asked into the side of Ray’s neck, dipping his fingers back behind Ray’s balls and stroking him gently.

Ray made an inelegant noise. He could feel James smile against the side of his neck.

James tore open the packet of lube with his teeth and got his fingers wet with it, and he leaned down to kiss Ray deeply even as he pressed into him with two fingers. His hands were blunt and finely shaped, and he curled his fingers gently in a motion that made Ray shiver. He could feel his face growing hot.

While Ray tried to regulate his breathing, James opened him up with the deliberate slowness Ray had come to expect. He scissored his fingers, spread them carefully, added a third. “Ray,” he said, finally. “You have to tell me what you want.”

Ray let his thighs fall further apart around James. “Please,” he said indistinctly. He tipped his head forward just enough to watch James rolling on the condom, and the way his big hands trembled, just a little, before he smoothed them up Ray’s bare thighs.

“Yeah?” James asked him, and he nodded.

James nudged Ray’s legs apart and covered him with his body. He seemed to want… He seemed to need to be touching Ray as much as possible, pressing their chests together, moving his hand down to hitch Ray’s leg up around his waist, holding him. He pressed into him and Ray could feel sweat beading between them even though the night was cold and when James had picked him up they’d both been able to see their breath in the cab of the truck. James’ hips stuttered forward and stilled and they lay there for an eternity waiting.

Outside the party roared and ebbed and roared once more. James’s breath felt thunderous in Ray’s ears, sharp inhales through his nose. The surreality of the moment drenched him, and he began, very softly, to laugh.

James cuffed him on the shoulder. “What are you laughing at, fucker?”

Ray laughed more, and put his arms around James’ waist and hugged him because he could. “Just,” he said, fighting down another bubble of laughter, “You know… You. This. I don’t know.”

James leaned up on his forearms so he could look into Ray’s face. “Do you want me to stop?”

Ray felt very sure. He pressed his lips together and said, “No, don’t stop.”

James grinned and leaned down to kiss him even as he rocked his hips, fucking Ray slowly into the mattress. Ray pressed back against him and offered up the most wanton kisses, and when James worked a hand down between them to jerk Ray off he hissed through his teeth.

“God, yeah,” he gasped against James’s mouth. “James, God.”

James was breathing in thick, humid gasps, not kissing Ray, just pressing his mouth against him, eyes closed. When he came he pushed into Ray and held there, taut as a bowstring, panting into the side of Ray’s neck.

He untensed and moved against Ray, breathed into the shell of his ear: “Can I suck you off?” It was all Ray could do not to push him down by the shoulders. He made a desperate, undignified sound anyway, when James pulled out.

He wanted to complain but then James was pushing his mouth down around the head of Ray’s cock and pressing back into him with two fingers, curling them just so, drawing it out of Ray. It was over almost embarrassingly quickly. James wiped his wet lips on a corner of the sheet - Ray didn’t want to think about whoever’s bed this was - and gathered Ray up into his arms.

Their moment of stillness was rent by the sound of something shattering down the hall and a chorus of drunken laughter.

“You okay?” James said. He watched the way Ray was watching him.

“Mm,” Ray answered him. He felt undone, malleable, like the fabric of reality was thinner just then. He twisted closer to James and let himself be held. “I’m good.”

“You know,” James said, steadying a hand on Ray’s elbow. “I’m gonna keep chasing you until you realize this thing we’re doing is going somewhere.”

Ray took a deep breath in through his nose. It was… It was going somewhere, had gone somewhere already. For all James’s chasing, Ray felt more like he was being dragged off his feet. “I know it is,” Ray said finally.

There was another, louder crash from the party. Ray saw James jump a little at the sound of it.

“Good,” James said. “Then you can stop running.” He held his mouth against Ray’s temple until they could gather themselves enough to stand, to dress, to go home.

_February 2006_

Ray and James fought for the first time in a back alley behind the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. There was snow on the ground, big puddles of greying dirty slush crusted over with a brown film of ice, pocked with cigarette butts. Ray was yelling, which was unfamiliar to both of them, because he never did it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said, throwing his hands up. The words left his mouth in a hot gust that made a cloud of steam out in front of him for a moment.

James stumbled, and he looked confused, probably because he was. “Me? I just went to bat for you and you’re mad at me?” The bloom of a bruise was already encircling his eye and the bridge of his nose, and his busted lip oozed a little rivulet of blood down his chin.

“I didn’t want that,” Ray said, and his voice was low and dangerous. “How could you think I’d ever - that I’d want you to - what the fuck, James?”

“Did you even hear what he said?” James sounded incredulous more than anything, and Ray guessed he couldn’t fault him for that, but he was still pissed as hell.

“Yeah, I did.” Ray crossed his arms. “And I didn’t want to acknowledge it.”

“He called you a fag.”

“It’s not like he’s wrong.”

James huffed. “He said you couldn’t play the guitar.”

Ray almost wanted to laugh. “Well everybody else knows that’s not true.”

James put his face in his hands. “Ray…” he said, and for a minute Ray didn’t think he was going to say anything else, but then he looked up with the sort of hurt confused expression you don’t usually see on adults. “Why do you let people treat you like that?”

There wasn’t really any answer. Ray gave a one-shouldered shrug and stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat. Now that the fire had gone out of him, the alley was suddenly and oppressively cold. “I don’t let it get to me,” he said, finally.

James inspected the bruised knuckles of his left hand. “Yeah, well, it gets to me, so.”

“Well it’s none of your business!” Ray interjected. The image was still vivid in his mind, James knocking bar tables and people out of the way, punching the heckler squarely in the jaw, and the way his closed fist had recoiled like the kickback from a gun, knuckles bloody. The way it hadn’t stopped there, hadn’t stopped until Matt and Sean had pulled him back by his arms, and the way he shook in their grip, furious.

“None of my business?” James’ head jerked up. “Ray, you’re my boyfriend. And people shouldn’t talk about you that way.”

“Because I’m your boyfriend?” Ray asked, skeptical.

“Because you’re amazing.”

It was a line, and Ray knew it, but he went to James anyway. He kissed James’s bloody mouth, and when James winced, he kissed him harder. “Don’t,” he said, and punctuated it with a kiss. “Do. That. Again.”

James got both his hands inside Ray’s open coat and hugged him, and they stood there like that for a long time in the freezing alley. The light above the back entrance to the club was an old, sodium-orange thing, and it made the dirty snow around them otherworldly in the quiet.

“Ray,” James said, again. He pushed his face into Ray’s neck. Ray could feel the cold tip of his nose nudging in underneath his scarf. “I love you, okay?”

Ray didn’t know what to say. He hugged him tighter. “Okay.”

“And I’m not sorry for punching that asshole, because he deserved it, but I’m sorry for… Fucking up with you. I don’t ever want to do that.” He buried his face in the crevice between Ray’s scarf and the collar of his coat. Ray wanted to be looking at him, to be having this conversation face to face, but he didn’t know how to say that. When James continued, he was muffled by Ray’s chest. “I know that’s stupid and impossible, but you just… You make me want to be. Better, I guess. Better than I am.”

Ray swallowed. “James, I -”

“You don’t have to say it back.” He did pull back then, and tilted his head to the side. Under the watercolor edges of the black eye, James’s face was stung pale in the cold. The blood on his mouth looked sharp and dark, and Ray reached up to scrub it away with the pad of his thumb.

“I want to say it back,” he started, and James interrupted him again.

“Say it when you’re ready. I’ll be here.” James turned his face in against Ray’s hand and kissed his palm.

Ray wanted to argue, and he wanted to be ready, and he knew he wasn’t. And James knew it, too, which was the indignity of it. Instead, he said, “Let’s go home,” which meant Ray’s apartment, and Ray tried not to let himself think about things like moving in together even though James stayed with him more nights than he didn’t, and even though the thought made his chest feel constricted and warm and happy. He held James’s bruised hand on the way back to his truck and leaned across the center console to put his head on James’s shoulder for the entire ride home.

He wanted to say it then, but he didn’t.

_March 2006_

It took Ray three weeks of fretting to say it back. He’d been making plans - this was embarrassing, the fact that he’d thought out a few scenarios, had the conversation over and over in his head, because it was James and James had already said it, so it wasn’t like Ray was even risking much. But he wanted it to be special, and he supposed James would call him a sap if he tried to stage it, so he was trying to be nonchalant about the fact that he wanted to script the whole damn thing.

In the end he didn’t get any sort of perfect scenario. James had been making dinner, standing in the four square feet of space between Ray’s tiny sink and his tiny stovetop, heating up yesterday’s leftover Chinese takeout in a hot skillet. He was humming to himself. Ray had two beers in one hand and a bottle opener - a cast-iron one shaped like a whale that James had got him at the Natural History Museum when they’d gone, stoned, on a free Tuesday afternoon a couple weeks back - in the other. James lifted the skillet and shook it to distribute the heat.

Ray loved him.

“I was thinking,” James said, not looking up from what he was doing. “We could get a pet. I know you can’t have a dog or a cat but like, how do you feel about one of those cool fighting fish?”

“I love you,” Ray said. It tripped out of his mouth before he could contain it.

James set the skillet down. The slope of his shoulders, the tendons in his neck, the way his jeans never fit him right… Ray loved him.

“Ray?” James said. He turned around.

“I love you,” Ray said again.

James stared at him. “So this means we’re definitely getting one of those fish, right?”

Ray pushed James’s arms open and settled in against him. “Whatever you want,” he said. And this was the part he was really nervous about, the thing he’d wanted to rehearse, to wait until the right moment, but it was all spilling out anyway. “I love you and I was thinking maybe you’d like to move in. Here. With me.”

James pushed his nose into the hollow of Ray’s throat and his breath, an inaudible giggle, tickled. “We’re so getting one of those fish.”

*

All told it took one weekend and two trips in the pickup truck to move James in. It was still a studio apartment, and space was tighter, but Ray spent one morning mounting hooks on the walls for his guitars so they could fit James’s keyboard in the corner, and together they assembled a tetris-looking set of shelves from Ikea to accommodate James’s clothes and books and records. He was still teaching lessons out of his mom’s garage, though, so at least they didn’t need to find room for his drum kit.

They had allowed themselves two major indulgences, which wiped out James’s savings account entirely and left Ray with not much more. The first was a futon, a new one with a wood frame. They could’ve gotten something ratty and used on a pipe frame for cheap but James had insisted. “It’s our bed, dude, it’s important,” he’d said, and handed the man at the Sears his credit card. It was, if Ray was being honest, not even the nicest futon he’d ever seen, but he loved it. It was theirs, and when it was folded out and made up with the dorky star-patterned sheets James had brought with him, it looked like a real bed. If they ever had anyone over, they could fold it back up into a couch, like a real adult would have in their apartment. Ray felt giddy about it. He loved it.

The second indulgence was the fish, a concept which James had latched onto and refused to let go of. They went to the PetSmart in the same strip mall that Ray’s Guitar Center was in, and looked through the dozen or so betta fish on display before James put a hand on Ray’s shoulder and pointed.

“That’s our boy,” he said, his voice solemn.

Ray read the card next the fish’s tank. “Actually it says this one’s a girl -”

“Gender’s a social construct, Ray.” He pressed his nose to the glass and blinked at the fish. “I’m calling her Klaus.”

Ray stared at him. “That’s the stupidest name for a fish I’ve ever heard.”

“Look at her, though,” James said, pointing. “She’s all gothy.” Klaus fluttered her fins and postured in front of James’s face, like she was going to fight him and expected to win. “Hello Americans… This is Klaus from Common Denominator,” James said, voicing her in a pitched-down growl with the worst German accent Ray’d ever heard. “That’s, like, her death metal band. They’re from Finland. Get it? Because she has fins.”

“Oh my god, James, people are looking,” Ray said, laughing but mortified as James carried on.

“Ray we’re getting her, I love her,” James said, and even as he was doing his best convincing-Ray-to-do-something-stupid face, he was carefully easing her bowl off the shelf and into his arms.

They’d emerged twenty minutes later with a tank and an expensive water oxygenation hookup and a bag of decorative rocks and a canister full of fish food flakes. Ray hefted all that in his arms while James cradled a plastic bag - ballooned out with water, Klaus swimming restlessly inside - in both hands. Ray had to hold it all on his lap in the pickup truck on the drive back to the apartment, and James kept looking over at him to make sure he was keeping Klaus steady, and Ray kept smiling fondly back at him because they were going home.

That evening they’d assembled the tank and set it up on the top of the nicest, stablest bookshelf, and they’d made dinner and watched two back-to-back Buffy reruns and left all the dirty dishes to soak until morning. They’d had lazy, sentimental sex on their new bed and left one of the windows cracked open because even though it was mid-March in New Jersey and it would probably snow again in a week or so, it was deceptively warm outside and it smelled like spring.

“Goodnight, Klaus,” James said aloud. Ray pulled the blankets up over both of them and settled in behind James, fitting his knees against the backs of James’s. “Goodnight, Americans,” James said in his Klaus voice.

“I love you,” Ray said, whispering, pushing the words up against James’s ear.

James turned around in his arms and kissed him, and he tasted like the toothpaste they’d both used earlier, and underneath it, like himself.

_August 2006_

Ray had been filling in on guitar in James’s band for a couple of weeks, and even though it was good - the music worked, the guys were nice, he was getting paid - he was pretty excited for Matt to get over his flu so he could stop sitting in. It wasn’t like he wasn’t having fun, it was just… It was hard to keep up with James.

Musically they were locked in, and at home they were as happy as they’d always been, but this was James in his element. It was James with the friends he’d known a lot longer than he’d known Ray, and he was charismatic and brilliant and they all admired him with neither resistance nor effort. He was an ocean and Ray was only one shoreline, grateful to be touched by him.

Ray tried his best to play like Matt, which meant he dialed himself back to let James show off. He didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that James was probably too talented for this band. James loved playing with them.

They drove home with the truck’s windows rolled down, or, as rolled down as they’d go; the driver’s side window stuck halfway but James held his hand out of it anyway and coasted it along the air currents on the highway. It was sweltering, and months before James had traded his jeans in for what Ray considered to be the world’s ugliest pair of baggy cargo shorts. Ray was - and this was its own continual and startling realization - desperately in love with him.

They got home and unloaded their gear and James fed Klaus while Ray stuck some leftover pizza in the microwave and thought about what they were doing. Because they’d been living together for a few months, they’d been happy together for much longer, and yet… There was a problem, and it hadn’t gone away, and Ray had waited but nothing had changed.

It was hard to articulate, so he hadn’t brought it up. The only way he’d been able to say it to himself had sounded so self-pitying: “Eventually you’re going to realize you’re too good for me.”

James probably wouldn’t realize it tomorrow, he might not this year, but eventually whatever it was about Ray that had drawn him in would be revealed for what it was, something perfectly ordinary, and James would stay with him as long as he could stand out of pity and then he’d let him down gently and… Ray hated to think about it, which is why he thought about it almost constantly. Typical.

He joined James on the couch and they ate their pizza and talked about rehearsals, the couple embryonic groups Ray was playing in, and the labels that had been sniffing around at James’s last gig with his band. James put his legs over Ray’s lap and argued good-naturedly with him over a couple of recent reissues on Jade Tree and whether compilations ever had any artistic merit. James liked to revisit things, liked to ruminate on music, to try to see it in a new light. Ray thought greatest hits records were always cash-grabs funded by corporate greed.

“You’re probably right,” James said, and he set aside his plate and cuddled up closer to Ray. “But these days optimism is so punk rock.”

_January 2007_

It took longer than usual that year for the snow to fall. The sky over northern Jersey hung low for days, heavy with purpose, and Ray was riding the bus back to their apartment late one January evening when the first flurries began.

The rhythm of his life with James had been interrupted that morning when the truck refused to start. It was one of those hiccups that occurred just often enough to throw into perspective the fact that he and James had a _life_ together, a routine, that they had become so intertwined. Between the bus stop and the front door his hair and the shoulders and lapels of his coat had become brocaded with snow, and when he opened the door James called for him to leave his shoes in the hall and to please not drip everywhere, if he could help it. There was something spicy in the oven and it suffused the apartment with its warm scent. Ray hung his coat on one of the pegs by the door.

“Are you freezing?” James asked, coming over to him from the kitchen. “I couldn’t get a mechanic to come out today.” He brushed some of the melting snow out of Ray’s hair and smiled, and Ray smiled back because he couldn’t not, and stepped forward into James’s arms.

“My hands are frozen,” Ray said, and he put them underneath the back of James’s t-shirt to demonstrate, making him yelp and stumble back.

“You’re a _menace,”_ he hissed, grinning.

Ray caught him by the arm and reeled him back in and kissed him. Sometimes he couldn’t help kissing James.

Ray was still cold, and he hauled James deeper into the circle of his arms and kissed him harder, opened his mouth into it, and James made a surprised, delighted noise that came out muffled between them. It was irresistible. Ray pushed James back against the wall and pinned him there with kisses.

When the oven timer went off they both startled, Ray with his hand so far up the front of James’s shirt that it was practically half off him, both of them panting.

“Let me just -” James said, and he twisted out of Ray’s grip and ducked under his arms. Ray could hear him clattering around the kitchen, pulling a pan out of the oven and setting it on the stovetop. He came back and grabbed Ray by the wrist. “So the house doesn’t burn down. But. You know. It’ll keep for a little while.”

They tumbled out of the hallway and into their room, where their futon was folded and the laundry basket was overflowing because neither of them wanted to go the laundromat when it was this cold out, and James’s keyboard was still out in the middle of everything. Ray steered James back and pushed him down onto the couch before climbing up on top of him.

Despite everything they were still absolutely enthralled by each other. Times like this… Ray rucked James’s t-shirt up and kissed his chest and neck, and held him still by the hip. Outside the snow was falling more heavily now, tossed against the glass by the wind, piling up on the windowsill. Everything seemed muffled by the snow and by the odd light it reflected into their apartment. Ray pressed his cheek to James’s stomach and shut his eyes.

“I love you,” he said. No matter how much he said it, he never meant it any less.

“Ray,” James murmured. James could put so much meaning into a syllable, and without having to pause or think Ray understood what he was asking. They undressed, clumsy in the wintry half-light, and Ray bore James back onto the couch and kissed him.

When they were done there was no room for them to lay side by side, so Ray propped himself up on his elbows, still settled between James’s spread legs, and looked down at him.

It hadn’t really gotten any better, this odd paranoia that their happiness - although it was, to Ray, profound and complete - was somehow limited. James’s lashes fluttered and he opened his eyes to look at Ray, and leaned up to kiss him.

“I love you,” he said. “Do you want dinner or can we just pass out like this?”

Ray pulled a blanket down off the back of the couch to cover them and they both manoeuvred around until they were laying facing each other, as close as they could get. Ray wrapped his arm around James’s shoulder and stroked his hair until his breathing evened out, deepened, made obvious that he was asleep.

Ray stayed awake for a long time thinking.

_March 2007_

It was a year, almost to the day, after James moved in that Ray broke up with him.

Up until he actually said the words, he was almost convinced that he could dissolve the year and a half they’d spent together without a fight. It had become increasingly obvious - embarrassingly obvious - that it wasn’t going to work. And James was so kind to him, still. So loving. He had the grace to act surprised when Ray sat him down and told him he thought they should break up.

“Wait, Ray, what’d I do?” he asked, and there was no answer to that, not really.

“Nothing, it’s… You’re perfect, James, I just. I can’t.”

That night they’d argued all over the apartment, which wasn’t big to begin with: through the kitchen, where James calmly opened a beer for each of them and insisted they sit down and get to the bottom of what was bothering Ray; on the couch, where James finally got angry and called Ray a coward, which was, Ray guessed, pretty true; around the messy corner which housed their instruments, as James packed up his cables and his keyboard and set them by the door; through the bathroom and back through the main room, James holding a duffle bag, shouting, throwing his toothbrush and clothes haphazardly into it.

And then nothing. There was the sound of the pickup truck outside, faint, and Ray tried to hang onto it for as long as he could, laying there on the couch. Their bed.

It was dark. It was over. He wasn’t coming home.

  


*

 

Jamia wakes up like a drowning victim, eyes wide, one big, gasping breath. She stumbles back from Ray, unsteady on her feet, tripping over her own shoes. Someone’s arms catch her, someone’s voice trying to pull her back to reality. Reality? How many months have passed, how many moments have gone by?

“Jamia! Jamia! Can you hear me?”

It’s Lindsey, gently guiding Jamia to the ground with her arms hooked around Jamia’s middle. Everyone’s looking at her. They’re still beside the lake, still standing around in their awful orange jumpsuits... It can’t have been more than a few minutes between when she passed out and now, but everything she just lived through... Tears well in her eyes as she continues to look at Ray.

She pulls away from Lindsey’s grasp and raises her hand at Ray, keeping her distance from touching him. A part of her wants to hug him, to pull him into her arms in an understanding that he’s never had for himself through everything that’s happened. But another part knows somehow that touching him is what got her into this mess, so Jamia just shakes her finger at him, trembling. Tears fall from her eyes and down her face, and she shakes her head.

“You need to figure out. Your bullshit b-baggage, _fuck -"_

Jamia turns as her voice cracks, wiping her face with the cuff of her burnt orange sleeve. She stands up unsteadily and walks away from the group. All Jamia wants are nine orders of french fries from the shitty 24-hour burger joint across the street from her - no, _Ray’s_ apartment. That, and a pile of blankets on top of her where she can cry for the next few days in solitude, and she grits her teeth because those aren’t _her_ feelings. Lindsey trails behind her in a half-jog, just fast enough that she can get in front of Jamia and really look at her.

“Hey, what the hell just happened?”

Lindsey’s expression twists into a deeper concern, and she reaches her hand out to hold Jamia’s shoulder. Jamia flinches back, and shakes her head. She circumvents Lindsey’s gaze and heaves a sigh.

“I can’t… I’m pretty sure I can join Frank’s club now, though.” She says it with a bitter tone. She doesn’t want _this._ This feels invasive, feels wrong on too many levels. Jamia starts walking again, hugging herself. “I want fries,” she grumbles.

Lindsey nods. “Alright. Let’s get fries.”

 

*

 

Gabe leans back against the doorframe. He’s got plans - he can feel, in the back of his mind, all the threads weaving together, the way it’s all pulled taught. He savors it. When he uses… Whatever this is, this gift or curse, this imprecise will, he can feel a new thread of himself thrown out, coiling up from somewhere deep in his chest and pushing out through his mouth or his fingertips or his eye sockets. He feels pressure everywhere and it hurts, it’s delicious and awful. It makes him feel at once wholly present in his body and somewhere just outside of it.

When Bill walks in it all falls away.

Bill is everything Gabe’s not, he’s thoughtful and he’s smart and he’s gentle, Gabe can’t help but worship him. He dips his head forward to kiss Bill’s temple and then his ear, where the smooth fall of his hair is tucked back.

“Good morning,” Bill says around a yawn. He wraps himself up in Gabe. He smells like coffee and cinnamon and the generic cheap shampoo they both use even though they keep saying they’re going to get something better next time the bottle runs out.

“Work today?” Gabe asks. Bill is a waiter at one of those posh faux rustic restaurants in Manhattan’s East Village, and even though he says he likes it, Gabe worries about the long hours and late commute back to Jersey. He can’t afford to quit, though - the pay’s too good, and when Gabe’s in school during the year it’s Bill’s salary that keeps the rent paid and the lights on. They decided a long time ago that they were a team.

Bill makes a sleepy noise into Gabe’s shoulder. “Not til later,” he says. “I’ll be out late, though. You don’t have to wait up for me.”

As if Gabe wouldn’t.

With Bill out of the house in the afternoon it does give him room to lay some foundations, to test the tensile strength of some connections he’s been making. He files that notion away and focuses instead on the time they do have together. Bill’s still in an oversized t-shirt and boxers, and he looks skinnier even than he normally does. They share the pot of coffee and Gabe makes eggs, because it’s all he’s good at and it’s all they’ve got in the fridge by way of something nutritious.

Bill fills him in on all the restaurant gossip. He gestures in swirls and circles with his fork to illustrate each point, and spills a rivulet of coffee down his chin in his excitement. Gabe leans forward and licks it off, and Bill yelps “Gross!” and swats him and rubs his chin with the back of his hand, grinning.

Bill insists on doing the dishes. He is as elegant standing still at the sink as he is graceless in motion. His limbs are too long and too angular - he seems architecturally unsound, at best. But here in their little kitchen, his silhouette haloed by the straggly potted plants they keep on the windowsill, with his big hands submerged in soapy water and a tune bubbling up from his throat in a timid hum, he is perfect. Gabe wraps his arms around him from behind and whispers something stupid into his ear and gets a face full of suds for his trouble.

When Bill goes to catch the train into the city Gabe offers to go with him.

“It’s, like, ten blocks Gabe,” Bill says. He’s got both arms around Gabe’s neck like he doesn’t want to let go. Gabe doesn’t want him to let go.

“Yeah, Bilvy, but I’ll miss you,” Gabe whines.

“You know what you could do,” Bill says. He untangles himself from Gabe and roots the newspaper out of a pile of mail neither of them have bothered looking through. “See if there’s any good part time work you could do during the year.” He unfurls the paper and flips to the classifieds, then pushes it at Gabe’s chest. “So then you wouldn’t have time to miss me.”

“Wouldn’t have time to see you, you mean.” Gabe is sulking but it’s partly in jest. It’s a long-running conversation between the two of them, and Gabe wants to work, he does. He wants to move them to a better neighborhood if he can. It’s just hard.

He catches Bill at the front door. “Okay, I will,” he says, and kisses Bill’s smug smile.

“Go to bed early,” Bill calls over his shoulder as he walks out across the courtyard towards their street. “I’ll wake you up with something fun!”

Gabe watches him until he’s out of sight around the corner, then goes inside and starts shutting the house up. They don’t have air conditioning, and Bill is picky about his “delicate thermoregulation” which is something he actually says, almost always around a giggle. They throw the windows wide every night and get a couple of cheap box fans going, suffusing the apartment with cool night air, and every morning Gabe shuts the windows and pulls the blinds to keep the heat of the day out. With Bill out of the house and all the sunlight blocked out everything poaches, dusty, in the atmosphere Gabe creates. It’s moody and strange in his artificial twilight. He paces barefoot across the apartment and back, letting himself slip further back in his mind, out of the mundane and into the extraordinary.

He feels the threads he’s been ignoring tug at him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all! We ended up taking January off to do some regrouping and planning, and because both of us were traveling for a while. But the earth still turns and the fics get updated and so on. The easiest way to get news on upcoming chapters/unavoidable delays/etc is to grab either of us on tumblr, Jess @geeraymes and Jay @swiss-army-romance. 
> 
> Warnings in this chapter: some impermanent dying. Nothing we haven't seen before.

Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though,   
is simply that there’s so much of it, blaring in through the five senses.  
-Samuel R. Delany,  _ Dhalgren  _ (1975)   
  
  


Ray wakes up to a text from Gerard asking him if he’s coming to community service today. He hadn’t been planning on it. Whatever had happened with Jamia - and he’s still pretty fuzzy on the details - had left him feeling dizzy and wrung out for two days, and he wasn’t looking forward to seeing her again. Or any of them, not really. He texts Gerard  _ wasnt gonna, why?  _

_ theyre bringing in a grief counselor lol.  _ A ten second pause.  _ yknow because of james _

Well. That’s.  _ ok ill be there. _

Ray sticks two poptarts in the toaster and, while they’re heating up, feeds Klaus, picks up some laundry off the floor and reminds himself to go to the laundromat later. By the time he gets out to the community center he’s fully convinced himself that this is a terrible idea and no good can come of it. 

But he’s taken the bus all the way out here, and Gerard is standing out front talking to a guy Ray doesn’t know, so he waves because he doesn’t exactly have the emotional wherewithal to make new friends when he’s already had to learn the names of all the clowns he’s stuck in a superhero gang with. Gerard tries to call him over and he more or less pretends he can’t hear him.

Inside the rec center it might be worse, because without Gerard he doesn’t really  _ know  _ anybody. He stands next to Mikey, who’s got earbuds in but nods hello to him, and that’s almost friendly as far as Mikey goes, so.

Then Frank’s walking up to him looking sort of green, and Ray wants to melt right through the floor. He’s thinking about the way Jamia had grabbed his arm and then gone down like a sack of bricks, her legs crumpling under her, looking like some kind of exorcist outtake with her eyes rolling back and her lips moving but not making any noise. It had happened so fast, and everyone was shouting, and then when she came out of it Ray hadn’t been able to apologize - apologize for what, exactly? - before she was storming off all tearstained and angry.

And what she’d said to him. What did that mean?

Anyway he’s in no position to ask her now, not with Frank stepping right into his space and saying, “Hey man, we need to talk.”

“Uh…” Ray looks desperately for egress.

Frank sweeps his hair off his forehead with one hand, so it’s all mussed up and weird. “Look. Please?”

Ray doesn’t really know what to say to that, and it’s Mikey - whose music is up loud enough that Ray can hear it, tinny and unclear, from his earbuds - who talks. “Go with him, Ray, it’s not bad.”

Frank and Ray both turn to stare at Mikey, who hasn’t looked up.

“What the fuck?” Frank says dumbly.

Mikey tugs one earbud out from under his hat and turns to them. “Tell Ray you’re not gonna kick his ass, then leave me alone.”

“What he said,” Frank says, and puts his hand on Ray’s shoulder to steer him out to the front of the community center. Gerard and his pal aren’t out here anymore - it’s just the two them and the big field and the park, the slate grey ribbon of highway off to the right, the sun beating down.

“What do you want?” Ray says moodily. Frank does a lot of yelling: he’s happy, he yells; he’s upset, he yells; he’s mad, he catches on fire, he yells. Everything about him seems precisely designed to push on the rest of the world, to make him impossible to ignore, right down to his goddamn superpower.

“C’mon, man, don’t be like that,” Frank says. He puts his hand on the back of his neck, all small and sheepish. “I’m trying to apologize.”

Ray folds his arms. There’s plenty of reasons why they’re all trying to make nice with each other, not the least of which is that none of them know what the fuck is going on, but… He nods to Frank like,  _ go on. _

“I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat about the Jamia thing,” Frank says, and he keeps his eyes trained firmly at the pavement some twenty feet behind Ray. “She told me it wasn’t your fault.”

“Dude I don’t even know what happened,” Ray says. “That’s not… I mean, I just go all Danny Phantom, I don’t  _ hurt _ people with my… Y’know.”

“Your power.”

“You know you sound like a ten year old when you call it that, right?”

Frank laughs. “Yeah, but I haven’t found a better word for it, so tough.” He shifts his weight. He still looks uncomfortable, even under his smile. “She didn’t tell me what she saw but she told me in, uh, in no uncertain terms that she’d deck me if I made a joke like that again, so.”

Ray skates right past the flimsy apology. “What she saw? What d’you mean?”

Frank smiles, then, a genuine one. He unhunches his shoulders, gives Ray a pair of Bob Fosse jazz hands. “She’s an empath,” he says. “Or, at least, that’s what she’s calling it. She touches things and she can see, I don’t know, their stories.”

“Oh.” Ray would rather die than look Jamia in the eye again. What she’d said is making more sense now, god, what if… How much did she see?

“Anyway, just. Look, I want us to be friends,” Frank says earnestly. “I’m no good at this stuff but he meant a lot to me, too, and I just… I’m sorry I’m a shitheel, okay?”

It’s not the best apology in the world by a country mile, but it gets the job done.

 

*

 

It was Mikey who told Gerard about the whole group therapy thing. Mikey just finds these things out, somehow. They borrow their mom’s station wagon and show up early to the community center, not because either of them particularly wants to be there, but because putting it off will only drag out how much Gerard doesn’t want to talk about James. Not to some stranger, anyway, not when James is still around. For him, at least. 

Gerard hasn't talked to many people in the last few days. Mikey's been more aloof than usual, Ray is just hard to talk to, even over text, and James... James spends a lot of time away from Gerard, still. The logical part of Gerard understands why he's still upset, and that he and Ray still have this weird unchecked baggage that makes everything worse with the fact that they can't talk to each other. But the more selfish part of him wants to fight and throw a fit, to make sure that James realizes just how immature he's being.

Gerard splits off from Mikey at the rec center doors and wanders off towards the park. There's a kind of comfort to it, being in the place where it all happened. He remembers what Ray said to him, that day he came back - how this place affected him and his power. It holds a different energy now, after the storm, like it got zapped too. Gerard looks out at the lake, and he frowns.

This shouldn't have happened to any of them; none of it makes any sense. The worst part is, none of them even want to talk about it. James is dead, Gerard can't die, Ray turns invisible, Frank blows up, and Lindsey is some kind of a fucking witch. There’s whatever the fuck is going on with Jamia, which nobody totally gets yet, even after the episode by the lake. There's so much to this that they don't understand. How did this happen? Why is James the only one who died? Why isn’t Mikey affected? And it seems like the only one who wants to dig deeper into this is Frank. And no offense to Frank, but he's a wound a little too tight to talk to these days.

So Gerard's alone. He thinks that he should be used to this; acknowledges how melodramatic that sounds even in his head; can’t help thinking it anyway. He checks his phone and sees that it’s about time to head back, and, improbably, that there’s somebody he recognizes from a long time ago leaving the rec center.

“Bert!” he calls. “What are you doing here?”

Bert and Gerard know each other, technically, from a community center karate class they both took in elementary school. Across the field, Bert shrugs theatrically at him. When he gets up close, Gerard realizes Bert looks much the same as he did the last time they saw one another, maybe a year ago at a party. His hair is longer. Most of the baby fat that softened his face when they were younger has melted away, replaced by a defined jaw and a scruff of stubble. He’s got a couple tattoos Gerard doesn’t recognize.

They shoot the breeze for a little while. It’s nice - it’s really fucking nice, actually - to know some things haven’t gone all to hell after the storm.

“We should hang out soon, dude,” Bert says over his shoulder as he heads to his car.

That sounds nice. Like a nice, well-deserved break from the whole terrible everything. He waves at Bert’s car as it pulls out of the parking lot and heads off down the highway, and then he goes inside and his good mood pleats down into nothing in his chest like a folding house of cards.

They’re all sitting around in a circle of chairs with a woman who is presumably a social worker of some sort. There’s a space left open for him. They’re going to talk about James, and about how he’s dead, and how he’s not coming back, and how they all  _ feel  _ about it.

And here’s the kicker: the empty chair between Frank and Mikey, the one that’s practically got Gerard’s name written on it? Standing right behind it is James.

 

*

 

James is in his usual spot, standing a few feet behind and to the left of Gerard, watching Ray and Frank exchange a tense look. He didn’t follow them outside, or anything - Ray wouldn’t have wanted him to; was always very clear on James letting him fight his own battles - but he knows they’ve come to some sort of tenuous understanding _. _ This is the part that makes him incorporeally nauseous, the fact that he can read them both so well and can’t  _ do  _ anything, or say anything to either of them. He still wants to interfere in Ray’s life, even after everything, even though he never can again. James hates inaction. 

Is it morbid he’s here? Yeah, absolutely, but what else is he going to do? Let Gerard leave  _ Oldboy  _ on for him back at his house and wait for him to come home so they can look morosely at each other in silence? He’d been to his own funeral - a couple of days ago, standing between Ray and Matt, who were the only people in his life his mom had known well enough to invite, and wishing very much he could hold Ray’s hand. This couldn’t be that different, could it?

The person leading the group therapy session is some friend of Mark's, a social worker/grief counselor combination with a very soft voice who doesn't seem to know very much about any of them. She tells them emphatically to call her by her first name, which is Rachel.

"Does anyone want to start?" she asks. No hands go up.

James looks around the room, and he can't help but wonder if any of them - any besides Gerard, that is - realize he's there. If that's why they aren't saying anything.

Rachel looks down at her clipboard. "Ray?" She looks around expectantly. "The police report says you're the one who found the body, and Mark told me that you have... A history. With James. Do you want to start us off?"

James would've tackled her halfway through her sentence if he had a corporeal body. Putting Ray on the spot? Expecting him to talk about something important to him in front of people who are, for all intents and purposes, still strangers? It's the worst idea he's ever heard, and Ray already looks a little green, a little nauseated at the idea of stepping up to bat.

And then he swallows, his adam's apple bobs in his throat, and he says, "Yeah, okay."

Which is new.

Everyone looks expectantly at Ray, and unthinkingly, James goes over to stand beside him. If there's any justice in the world then some modicum of comfort, some transfer of the pride he feels any time Ray pushes himself outside of his comfort zone, will pass between them. Gerard is watching them across the circle of plastic chairs, his face guarded and stiff. That can't be helped right now.

"I guess everybody knows James and I used to date," Ray starts. It's wholly inadequate to describe their relationship - James sees Jamia stifle a snort, because she  _ knows _ \- but what else can he say? "And you're right, I did... Find him. Out there."

"That must have been hard," Rachel says, and looks around at the rest of the group trying to elicit sympathetic nods. It's a goddamn farce.

"Well. Yeah," Ray says. "I mean, it wasn't like... The best day of my life."

Across the circle, Gerard laughs, and Lindsey turns to him with her brows drawn together.

"We all have different responses to grief," Rachel says in her practiced social worker voice. "Sometimes our feelings are so big, or so hard to quantify, that all we can do is laugh. That's okay." She leans across the circle to put her hand on Gerard's arm, and he stares at it, uncomforted and uncomfortable. "Well," she says eventually, and draws back.

"I'll go," Frank says, sitting up straighter in his chair. "James was my best friend and I miss him and this fucking sucks."

"Acknowledging your feelings is the first step to healing," Rachel says, as if that means anything. As if any of them have trouble admitting that this whole situation is just lousy. Fuck, even James knows that. It just sucks.

"Right. Cool," Frank says. "So can I go?"

Rachel looks confused. "This is your opportunity to speak openly and honestly with your friends about this loss you've all suffered," she says, dismayed. "This is a venue for you to speak your mind, judgment free. I wouldn't write it off so lightly."

Frank looks at her for a long moment. "Is... Is that a yes? Can I go? Because, like, we're all pretty good at talking to each other already and, no offense, I'd prefer to do this chatting without the observation of somebody who doesn't know me and didn't know James and whose opinion is, frankly, irrelevant."

Rachel presses her lips together, and they whiten out so her mouth is just a thin line running across her face. "Anger is a normal part of the grieving process, Frank. It deserves to be felt and heard."

"Dude, I know," Frank says. Where he looked bored before, now he's starting to look annoyed, even mad. "I'm, like, probably better at knowing my own feelings than you are." He stands up, and the metal legs of his chair squeak on the tiles as it's pushed back. "And if this is all we're doing today then I'm just gonna peace out. Sorry."

He disappears into the rectangle of light from the door to the outside, and, distantly, James can hear the rumble of his car starting up.

Rachel looks around at them, like she's waiting for another one of them to throw a fit, or for somebody to follow Frank. James sort of wants to, if only because Rachel's looking at Ray again and James doesn't know how much more of Ray talking about him he can handle.

But she turns, instead, to Lindsey. Unexpected. Maybe interesting.

"Lindsey, did you know James well?"

It takes a moment, but she nods. "I guess so. I think everybody does, whether they try to or not."

Rachel seems to find this very interesting - she pauses to write something in her notes. "What do you mean by that?"

"Oh, just. Y'know. James is everywhere."

"His spirit?"

Lindsey laughs. It sputters out of her, like she's trying to force it back down her throat and can't. "Fuck, no, dude, he's just sort of an extrovert. We went to highschool together, and then he was all over the scene, so if you're like... A musician -" she nods to Ray "- or an artist or something like that, you just. I mean, he was around. He was everywhere."

"So you must all really be feeling his absence, huh?" Rachel's using a pediatric nurse voice, all cloying and condescending. James knows Lindsey's gotta hate it.

"I mean, yes? Christ, I thought you knew Mark.  _ He's _ fucking miserable about it - he and James used to play in some of the same bands a couple years back."

"I see."

There follows a long, awkward silence. James watches his friends, knows they must be thinking about him, remembering him. What he wouldn't give to be anywhere else right now, or to be so entrenched in this moment that he knew exactly what they were thinking.

"I'll go."

It's Gerard. He's looking straight at James, just above Ray's head.

"I don't know, maybe this is... Hard to talk about, or hear about, but James and I. We got cut off, I think. Before being...  _ Something." _  Gerard looks at Ray, sort of soft, sort of defiant. For two people who don't know each other so well, there is so much complicated, tangled substance between them. "I don't know, I guess... I feel like I'd give anything to know, like, what would've happened. If he'd lived."

"Coming to terms with that lack of closure is one of the hardest things about losing a loved one," Rachel says. "The temptation to dwell on it is huge, and having happy memories - even happy possibilities - can be comforting and healthy, but. I probably don't have to say it, but it's not sustainable, living in a constructed world outside of reality. You know?"

Gerard nods. "Yeah, I know. It's just hard to think about anything else when he's... Still with me." He clears his throat. "I mean, like Lindsey said, he's everywhere."

Rachel nods, makes a note on her clipboard.

They spend the rest of the time trading stories, which is the part James was looking forward to. Lindsey talks about having an art class with James in high school, and how they'd worked on a project together for which James had done exactly none of the work but spent so much time making her laugh that she didn't really mind. Jamia talked about riding in the bed of his truck to go to shows with Frank, everybody in the scene crammed into his pickup heading down to Asbury Park to see what was going on, and how they'd all felt like this - music and community and making it happen for themselves - was the most important thing in the world. How much James loved being a part of that.

Ray said, cryptically, that James had taught him not to wait for other people to decide things for him. To try to take what he wanted for himself. To know he deserved things. James put his fingers to his lips and thought about kissing Ray in the open doorway of his parents' house two years ago, and saw Gerard watching him do it. Jamia was looking at Ray intently, and James tried to ignore the fact that she had this strange access to their history together. It couldn't be helped.

So little could be helped, not by him, at least.

"I think we got some really good work done today, guys," Rachel says. She passes around a handful of business cards and urges all of them to call her if they want to talk more. James finds his hand extended, as if he could take her card, as if he could call her and have her talk him through his death. It isn’t that he thinks she’s really so good at her job - she mainly parroted their own words back to them, or spouted fortune cookie truisms that hardly required a qualifying degree - but he wants... He wishes he could talk to somebody.

For all that they'd spent an hour talking around and about James, and all the strange, sentimental, positive feelings he had from that, he’s never felt more alone.

 

*

 

Jamia stays in her seat after the therapy session. She looks down at her lap, and her gaze doesn't move, even as she sees the toes of Lindsey’s boots beside her own, sees the light change as Lindsey’s shadow falls over her. Lindsey pats Jamia's knee, careful not to touch her skin. Jamia flinches regardless.

"How are you holding up?"

Jamia laughs, and she shakes her head. She looks at Lindsey, and she wants to be funny about it but she doesn’t know how. Since the day beside the lake with Ray, this power, whatever it is, has just gotten worse. "I can't touch anyone, Lindsey. My mom hugged me, and I got stuck feeling all of her fears about my grandma's health. My brother pats my shoulder, and I'm in his life, feeling his anxieties about whether his band is going anywhere. Animals are fine, for now, but people... I'm untouchable, Lyn." The last line falls so defeated from her lips, a damning life sentence.

Lindsey nods and pulls her hand away. This is the most they’ve actually talked directly about it - so far Jamia has stuck to saying something noncommittal, flinching away whenever anyone comes near her, pretending she’s fine but sucking at hiding the fact that she isn’t. She’s sure Lindsey must have her theories - after all, she’s the one who’s seen the most of the strange aftermath. The day that she’d touched Ray, Lindsey had sat with her in a diner afterwards sharing three consecutive baskets of disco fries while Jamia cried, unable to describe what was happening to her. That takes a certain amount of trust.

Lindsey sits down beside her and settles her backpack in her lap, fiddling with the zippers. "Did you ever see X-Men?" she asks.

Jamia’s skeptical. She nods slowly. "Yeah... Frank and I saw it in theaters."

Lindsey nods again. "You know Rogue's powers are a lot like yours. She could steal powers, strength, share memories with people. Just by touching them. Sounds like you just have the memory part of that, right?"

"What, so I should be grateful that I'm not putting people in the hospital with my powers too?" It’s rude, it’s reactionary. Jamia regrets snapping immediately, even though Lindsey doesn’t react. "Sorry. Just... What are you getting at?"

"It's okay." Lindsey unzips her backpack and pulls out a plastic bag. "What I'm saying is that Rogue had a way to work with it, even if she couldn't get rid of her powers at the time." She pulls a pair of thin black leather gloves out from the bag. The palms and the pads of the fingers are textured to grip, and a pattern of woven lilies and vines are embroidered over the backs of the hands. They extend up to the mid forearm in length, vines stretching up and across the arms in knots and tangles. Lindsey offers them to Jamia, shrugging.

"I thought you could do something too."

Jamia takes them and inspects them with a carefully, eyes wide. They're lovely, delicate. They fit her very well, she finds out as she pulls one of them on. "Lindsey, these are gorgeous. Did you make them yourself?" Jamia looks at her covered hands, asking the question in a faraway voice. They're beautiful. They look magical, enchanted, like a fairytale object.

"I mean, I used the store bought gloves as a base, but I spruced them up myself." Lindsey’s not bragging, she’s just stating a fact. Her red mouth twists in a smug grin when Jamia looks up at her.

Lindsey points to the grips on the palms. "Those are good for general grip, but they’re also supposed to work on a touch screen too, if you use those. They, uh, they came like that. I didn’t know if you needed that but, y’know, just in case.” Lindsey shrugs, her smug smile turning sheepish. “And I thought the decorations would be nice for feeling like this isn't a bad thing, but something that can be beautiful? Maybe that's too deep, maybe they're just flowers."

She's babbling. Jamia tries hard not to think it’s adorable. The gift seems so extravagant, so needlessly, decadently thoughtful. Lindsey’s expressions, embarrassment and self-satisfaction by turns, are in a way their own gift. She reaches for Lindsey's hand, while she continues to talk, and folds it into her own gloved palm. Relief washes over her when nothing happens, and Lindsey raises her eyebrows.

"You don't look like you're stealing my memories," she offers with a playful smile. Lindsey intertwines her fingers with Jamia's. She looks down at the vanishing point between them, their interlaced hands. In that moment Jamia knows, even without her powers, how relieved they both are to have this moment.

"Thank you, Lindsey, seriously," Jamia says. She pulls Lindsey into a hug. She takes a moment in Lindsey's arms to just stay, to find a home in them. Lindsey rubs Jamia's back in small circles.

"Hey, don't worry about it. Just want you to feel okay," Lindsey tells her, and as she pulls away Jamia can see her face tinged persimmon red, pleased with herself, and with the way they are together.

 

*

 

"You shouldn't have come," Gerard says. It's a lame argument to have but what else can he do, really. He can't help it. It's true. They’re back home, him and James, and Mikey in the next room taking a nap. Gerard is several kinds of furious for reasons he can’t wholly articulate - it’s such an intrusion, such a betrayal of trust. Gerard tells James everything, anyway. 

He shouldn’t have come.

"Right, and what should I have done instead? Sit around and wait for you?" James retorts. There's no good comeback to that. As angry as he was, Gerard is quickly deflated. James can and should do whatever he wants, Gerard guesses. The world owes him that much.

"I just don't want to see you hurt," he says, lamely. "I don't know what... I mean, I don't have the bible on you and Ray in my head like Jamia does, but I've got a feeling it's pretty fucking complicated."

James laughs humorlessly. "I mean, did you have stuff you wanted to say that you couldn't say in front of me? Doesn't that sort of go against what we've got going for us here?"

"James, we don’t have anything going for us."

"You know what I mean."

Gerard does, of course, but he's still annoyed. He hates this, hates everything about what they're doing together. They can't touch, they can't even really have a happy celibate relationship. There's the constant looming threat of James just disappearing, hanging over them like the goddamn sword of Damocles. It makes Gerard nervous to let him out of his sight.

"I just... There are some things that I wish I could talk through with somebody else who's. I don't know. I don't know!" Gerard raises his hands in defeat. "I'm not exactly like, good at this. I haven’t had much practice."

There's a long, pendulous silence. James looks at him, stony-faced.

"What do you want me to do, James?"

If either of them had the answer to that question they wouldn't be having this fight.

"You could talk to Ray, you know."

"I don't want to."

James sighs. "It's not like I love the idea of you guys, y'know, bonding over... Y'know. This. But he might actually understand where you're coming from." He hesitates. "I think you'd really like each other, honest to god."

It's Gerard's turn to just look at him.

"He's a really good guy, Gerard. He's easy to talk to, if you give him the chance."

"I don't want to talk to him, I want to talk to  _ you." _ Gerard's aware of how petulant he sounds, of just how pathetic this is.

"You  _ are _ talking to me, and you're still miserable." Leave it to James to point out just what's wrong.

Leave it to Gerard to come up with the one thing more pathetic than anything he's said already. It comes slipping out from between his lips before he can stop it. "But I love you."

James pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. It's not exactly the reaction you're going for when you make a declarative statement like that, even if they've covered it, even if they both know that it's true.

"I know," he says finally. "I'm really fucking sorry."

Gerard wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, and of course he can't. Of course there's nothing either of them can do to fix this, none of the easy outs that they could take if they could just touch.

"I don't want to talk to Ray, I don't want to be with anyone else," Gerard says. "I don't know what else to say."

"Gerard -"

"I know you don't want to hear this but I just, I want to make this work. I want it to be okay that I love you, and I want us to figure out how to be together -"

"Gerard,  _ no." _

Gerard has never seen this look on James's face. He’s gone completely blank, emotionless, but his jaw juts out like he's clenching his teeth together.

"Why not."

"Gerard… I’m dead. I'm literally dead, I don’t exist, I just... I don't see how you can't know that that’s a bad idea."

"You're here. We're talking. Relationships aren't just about sex or going out in public or, I mean, we still have... We're still... Connected."

"You said it yourself, Gee. There’s nothing going for us."

With that, James turns and passes entirely through the wall, and then he's gone.

 

*

 

Spite more than anything else keeps Gerard from texting Ray. It's a good idea, he hates to admit. They should talk to each other. They could help each other. He doesn't want to give James the satisfaction, though, so he scrolls through his contacts until he lands on the name of somebody who would never expect him to talk about his feelings.

_ ive had a shit day do u wanna hang out _

He waits four long minutes and then his phone vibrates in his hand, the front screen displaying a pixelated response.

_ come over _

Bert and Gerard may have met in karate class, but they’re friends more because their moms were in the same book club, and because they lived relatively close to each other growing up, and still do. One of those situational friendships that has very little to do with who you are as people, and everything to do with convenience. Still, he likes Bert. It’s been a while since they’ve hung out. Gerard doesn't bother to borrow his parent's car, just walks the twenty minutes to Bert's house with the late afternoon sun beating down on him, making him sweat.

Bert's house has a screen door, shut, and a front door, propped open just behind it, and Gerard lets himself in. None of the lights are on, and the shades are all drawn, so that every dust mote is illuminated in the fat rectangle of sunshine coming through the front door, and here and there seams of light extend from cracks in the curtains, ethereal and lovely. Bert's in his room with headphones on, eyes closed, mouth slack. He might be asleep.

"Hey," Gerard says, a little loudly just in case his music is too loud, and Bert's eyelids slit open, and he smiles.

"You want to tell me about your shitty day?" he asks. As he speaks, he sits up, pushes the headphones off his ears and down around his neck.

"Absolutely fucking not," Gerard says, and they both laugh.

They end up watching a cartoon marathon, Samurai Pizza Cats followed by Gundam Wing followed by Chalk Zone. It's stylistic whiplash, but they're both having fun, tuning it out enough to talk about music and Gerard's community service and everything.

"That's fucked up," Bert says, when Gerard - against his better judgment - lays out the schematics of the triangle between him and Ray and James, who is - to Bert's knowledge - dead as a Greek poet.

"Tell me about it," Gerard says.

"I mean, like, you guys  _ have _ to fuck now though," Bert says. He's kidding, probably. They both have a good laugh about it.

"Honestly? He's cute, and all. It's just too complicated. The last thing I need is all those feelings and shit, like, we're both fucking garbage at coping. I'd just want to, y'know. Lose myself in it for a little while and then not have to deal with the aftermath. Y'know?"

Bert nods. "I get that."

For a while they sit together on the end of the bed, watching a Toys R Us commercial, and then an Olive Garden commercial, and then the climax of the cartoon they'd been half paying attention to, something Gerard isn't familiar with.

Gerard shifts closer. He's testing the boundaries. The fight with James has left him feeling exhausted and starved for affection, and Bert is warm and familiar and expects nothing of him. When Gerard moves, he turns to face him and the understanding is there. Bert puts his hand on Gerard's shoulder and leans in to kiss him.

It is uncomplicated between them. They’ve done this before, as teenagers, once in the back of Bert’s car, once at a party where neither of them had been as drunk as they’d let one another believe at the time. Gerard laughs into the crook of Bert’s neck. The TV flickers and plays its hodgepodge of cartoon background noise, and underneath it the two of them are barely audible.

The room is warm, but not too warm.

 

*

 

Mikey’s working on it.  _ It  _ being this whole mind-reader thing. He’s with Frank - that’s the first hurdle. Gerard took off a while ago to go do whatever helps him deal with the whole dead boyfriend situation, and for a little while Mikey had dozed in the mid-afternoon sun, reveling in the limited quiet. And then Frank had texted him  _ wanna hang? pick u up in five  _ and Mikey had hesitated, sent back an emoticon, and squirmed back into his jeans. 

They’re at - well, it can be hardly called a park, can it? It’s one of those dried-up triangles of dead grass in the middle of a narrowing street, with a polished, standing rock in the middle bearing a dedication to “The Veterans.” Veterans of what? Mikey can’t read the rest of the plaque from where he’s sitting, and Frank won’t get up to read it to him, so he supposes he’ll never know.

Frank is radiating waves of joy and friendly anxiety, sitting a couple of feet away and pulling blades of grass up between his pinched fingers. Frank is so much louder than everyone else, somehow. Mikey figures if he can train himself to handle Frank’s feelings, everything else will just fall into place.

So that’s what he’s doing.

It’s almost nice, out here where nobody in the occasional cars whisking by is feeling much of anything, where it’s just the two of them and everything Frank’s putting out into the world is positive, even if it’s a little complicated. The fact that Mikey can tell Frank’s got a bit of a crush on him is, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s… He feels like he doesn’t have the right to know it yet. He wishes he could unlearn it for Frank’s sake, more than his own. But, well. These things happen, apparently.

Frank surreptitiously rolls a spliff when there’s a lull in traffic, and then they spend a good half hour testing out something Frank’s been practicing, lighting a warm orange flame in the palm of his hand and holding it there.

Once Frank can hold himself together, neither catching the rest of his arm conspicuously on fire, as he had three times, nor letting the flame douse itself the second he looked away from it, Mikey leans in, holding the spliff between his lips. Frank keeps a perfect globe of flame in the hollow of his palm and watches Mikey hollow out his cheeks, inhale until the flame catches and glows, cherry red, first burning just the paper, then the tobacco. Smoke curls, warm and pungent, from between his parted lips.

It’s easier, now, not to mind the volume of Frank’s thoughts. Whether it’s because the weed makes Frank think quieter or makes Mikey less attuned to it, he’s not sure, but…

He lays back on the grass, and it crackles underneath his head. He doesn’t need to be any kind of psychic to sense Frank laying down beside him. Above them the sky is all emphatic ultramarine blue threaded through with wisps of cloud. Frank takes his hand, if only to pluck the blunt from between his limp fingers and hold it to his own lips. A miasma of smoke fills the air above them and is whisked away.

The little park has two trees, and their branches shatter the sky into a rough mosaic, one Mikey could almost touch. He reaches for Frank’s hand, instead, and the deadened calm he holds between his fingers, and the quiet between the both of them.

 

*

 

Bert pops up on his elbows beside Gerard in bed. It is such a relief to be alone like this, to accept an offered cigarette and feel no obligation to look for a premonition of the cloud of smoke escaping from the corner of his mouth. The TV in the background plays the tin-whistle melody of a cartoon theme song. The room has grown dark around them, and the light from the TV lights the side of Bert's face and the seashell curve of his ear, pushed out a little where his hair is tucked behind it, in an alternating display of whites and yellows.

"Y'know, you're not bad company," Gerard says. He drags on the cigarette, then exhales brusquely out of the side of his mouth so that a jet of smoke passes through the corner of this field of vision. "This was really, really nice."

Bert twists and lays back down on his back, so their shoulders are touching, side by side. "Yeah, yeah, I like you too," he says. "I don't... I mean. For the record, I’m not..." He scrubs a palm over his face and turns to look at Gerard through the gloom. "I don't mean to bring it up if it sucks for you but I do know. Did know. James. And you told me you have - had - a thing with him, and I'm not... I have no expectations, here, is all I'm saying."

Gerard looks at him, at his ski slope nose and the weal of sleepy purple that surrounds his eye. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, in the dark. Gerard shifts so he can lean forward and kiss him, sloppy and unassuming and slow. When he pulls back he wipes his wet lips with the back of his hand. "Okay," he says, for lack of anything better to say. "I mean. That's good."

Eventually they both sit up a little more, rearrange the pillows and prop themselves up to watch the DuckTales marathon on the TV, not exactly cuddling but not keeping much distance. Gerard slings his arm around Bert's bare waist and tangles their ankles together. The intimacy here isn't the kind he's been sharing with James, the sort that comes with absolutely transparent emotions and long talks and parsing their feelings together. Gerard isn't compelled, at all, to put a label on what he's doing or what he's feeling. But there is an intimacy here, in the way Bert shifts to cup the back of Gerard's head in his hand, not making any move to kiss him but holding him all the same.

It is a relief like none he could've possibly imagined.

That lasts all of about five minutes.

Gerard can feel the shift as soon as it happens - it's like an entirely different person is lying next to him. Bert's gone rigid, staring dead-eyed at the TV. He turns to Gerard, but he's not looking at him, it's like he's looking through him. There's nothing going on behind his eyes.

"Hey, dude, you okay?" Gerard asks, and then he's. It's not something Gerard's ever felt before.

It's the most excruciating pain he could possibly imagine.

He doesn't have the time to say anything else, to protest. A strangled scream is plucked up out of the deepest part of his chest, and it rends the stale air in the room. Between the pain and the noise Gerard's nerves are on fire, everything is rushing into him. It's like feeling in technicolor. It's all too much.

Even if he could stop screaming long enough to protest, Gerard doesn't know what he would object to. It has to be Bert - or, rather, it has to be this Bert-shaped monstrosity that bears no resemblance to the friend he was just laying with. His hands are out in front of him, bent strangely. His head sways on his neck like a dandelion in the breeze, all unconscious movement. He looks half-asleep.

Then he speaks, and his voice sounds like his, but the mannerisms are all wrong.

"We shouldn't exist," he says. The words come out like he's having trouble fitting his mouth around them. "It's better this way."

His hands jerk all of a sudden and Gerard feels his body contort without his permission, his spine bend up in a sharp, strange curve. Underneath the sharper pain of whatever Bert is doing to him there's the dull ache that says his body wasn't made to move like this.

From where he's laying precariously at the edge of the bed he can see one of Bert's hands lift, preparing to move, his fingers flexing. He does a quick motion, almost like he's snapping, and Gerard's head whips around on his neck. He hears the grotesque crack of his own spine breaking, and then everything around him whites out.

Death is becoming, he reflects, awfully familiar.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's all happening, kids. We're finally teasing out the first threads of what the hip youths are calling "plot." As always you can grab author Jess on tumblr @geeraymes and author Jay @swiss-army-romance. 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: some light violence, some uh. Some slightly unconventional smut. Proceed with caution.

“ For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life. ”  
Frank Herbert,  _ Dune  _ (1965)

 

When Gerard comes to he is aware, first, of Ray’s hands on his face, and the way the light seems to fluctuate around him and through him, like he’s some kinda desert heat mirage. They’re alone - where are they? Ray’s crying, and it’s making his eyes all red and puffy and wet. Gerard turns his head, and it aches - something in his neck twinges and makes the muscles all down his arms jump - and he is made aware that he is on the floor, that the floor is dirty, that this detritus is of the type that accumulates in his own room: crumpled paper, receipts, laundry, empty pringles cans and beer bottles and all. 

But this isn’t his room.

Ray sees him move and starts crying harder, and he flickers in and out of existence like a sputtering light bulb, with a strobe light rapidity that makes Gerard shut his eyes against it. He can see the light way the light changes through his closed eyelids. He forces himself to speak, and at first his voice crackles and fails him, and then again, but on the third time it lurches out of his mouth, strange and urgent.

“Ray, please!”

There is a flare of heat and Gerard can almost feel Ray solidifying beside him. Gerard opens his eyes to a blurry world and an entire, substantial Ray sitting beside him.

“What happened?” he asks, stupidly, trying to sit up. His body doesn’t fit quite right now that he’s back in it - he can feel the nerves in his neck shiver, repairing themselves, bringing with them a flood of heat and pressure and pain, vague memories.

“You were dead,” Ray says shakily.

“That’s…” Gerard sort of laughs, but it sticks in his chest and gets muddled up in a wet, posthumous cough. “I mean, that’s sort of my thing,” he says. He raises himself up enough to collapse, boneless, into Ray’s lap.

Ray folds himself around him. This… this helps. He’s got a tentative hand buried in Gerard’s hair and he’s all twisted up so that Gerard’s face hits somewhere on the far side of his ribs and his chest is completely engulfed in him, pinned under his arms, and he feels himself settling back into his body. It’s visceral and strange, something he didn’t register the last times he died because… Well, because he was drunk, and because he wasn’t looking for it.

It’s only after they’ve sat like that for a few long minutes that he comes back enough to hear a commotion from below them.

“Ray,” he says, half-muffled into his armpit. “What’s going on?”

Ray pulls back a little bit so he can look him in the eyes. He’s still all splotchy and unsettled-looking, but more than that he looks scared, and it cuts into him.

“Do you remember how you died?” he asks.

Gerard takes a moment. Nods. An echo of pain lances through his back. “Fuck,” he hisses. “Where is he?”

Ray’s eyes drop to the floor, to what must be happening underneath them. “Mikey had… A feeling, I don’t know,” he says. “We all -”

There is the unmistakable sound of shattering glass, and Gerard is on his feet. He’s unsteady and Ray wavers behind him, ready to catch him, a curious beacon of strength and uncertainty and that fear he saw in him already.

From the landing of the stairs he can see the wreckage.

 

*

 

Mikey hears Gerard waking up. Or, coming back. It’s different. Usually he hears people like he’s walking into broadcasting range with a handheld radio: first there is static, then it resolves itself into words or pictures, into clarity. When Gerard comes back he’s sudden and loud and he drowns out everything else, making Mikey stumble into the wall, clutching his head. 

When Gerard comes downstairs Mikey feels his reaction like a gutpunch. It looks worse than it is, he knows that - that’s Frank’s fault. When they all broke in, not knowing exactly what they were looking for but  _ trusting  _ him for some reason, knowing something bad had happened to Gerard, Bert had been nearly catatonic on his couch, clutching a cigarette and staring at nothing. Mikey had known immediately what had happened, why he couldn’t sense Gerard at all. He could see the image of Gerard’s body bending and breaking seemingly of its own volition, playing over and over in a loop at the front of Bert’s consciousness.

Mikey, in his infinite wisdom, had flatly said, “He killed my brother,” and Frank had gone bananas.

So there’s scorch marks all over the place, smoldering throw pillows and ruined carpet and Bert crouching on one side of an upturned wooden coffee table in some kind of heinous standoff as Frank tries not to completely burn the house down around them. Lindsey’s beside him, materializing pots and pans and bricks, things to throw, out of thin air and hurling them at the coffee table. It splinters a little more with every impact. On the landing Gerard looks horrified but he  _ feels  _ worse, loud in the base of Mikey’s skull. Bert’s moving his hands in this strange, contorted way, and then Frank jerks to the side and smashes into Lindsey and they both hit the side of the sofa, collapsing over it and sending up a shower of sparks.

Mikey covers his ears with both hands and sinks to the floor. There’s something he can do, there has to be, but he can’t hear himself think over the way everybody else is panicking. Jamia’s spent the whole fight more or less cowering in one corner and the mental hyperventilating she’s doing as she watches Frank and Lindsey fall roars in Mikey’s ears.

And then there’s Bert, who’s almost eerily silent, just that same, static loop of Gerard bent and twitching in pain, the strangled bubble of his breath through his crushed windpipe, the sickening crunch as his head jerks to the side and his neck snaps and he goes limp.

Mikey tries to push his consciousness down into the very deepest part of himself, to shape it into something sharp. He threads it cautiously out to where Bert is, crouched behind the upturned coffee table, panting.

Gerard writhing. The snap of Gerard's neck. Gerard falling still.

Mikey loses his composure.

All at once he's outside of himself, some tendril of his strange power tethered to his body and not a part of it, reaching into the tableau in Bert's mind and... Absolutely wrecking it. It's not something he can easily describe in retrospect, only it seems like there are rooms connecting to the one Bert's brain is living in, corridors of memory and feeling and personality, and Mikey goes at them with the psychic equivalent of a sledgehammer. The scene where he's killing Gerard over and over crumbles to plaster, then to dust.

Mikey tears down whatever he can get his hands on. He pushes himself further into Bert's mind and leaves destruction in his wake, trying not to lose hold of whatever thread is still tying him to his own body, diving in deeper and deeper.

Then he comes up against something he can't move, something he doesn't recognize. It's...

Mikey tries to put his palms against it, this darkness, this presence that seems wholly out of place.

_ What are you, _ he thinks. And then,  _ who are you? _

It's not Bert. Whatever this is, it's an intrusion - it's like what Mikey's doing right now, only instead of bull-in-a-china-shopping its way through Bert's mind it's miles more subtle. It's cordoned off some part of Bert and left only the bare necessities and the trauma of what happened with Gerard.

Mikey puts a shoulder against the thing and shoves, and he feels something powerful and terrible pushing him back, out of the wrecked corridors of Bert's mind, the tether he's kept back to his own body reeling him in like a fishing line. As the detritus he's left in his wake comes rushing past him all Mikey can think is...

_ What have I done? _

The thing about being forced back into his own mind is, it's still loud in there. His eyes stream and he holds his head in his hands. He can feel Frank kneeling unsteadily beside him petting his back. Underneath the roar of everyone's panic he can hear actual voices, can hear Gerard yelling Bert's name, and he makes himself look up.

Bert's on the ground and everyone's crouched around him. He's not moving.

"Mikey," Frank says quietly. "What's your power?"

Mikey shakes his head, two sharp jerks from side to side. It's too bright, too loud, Frank's hand on his back is impossibly sharp and carries the weight of too much.

Finally, he answers the question with one of his own. "Did I kill him?"

"Jesus, Mikey," Frank says. "No, no he's breathing, but..."

Mikey doesn't need to look at him to feel what's changed between them. Where before Frank had radiated waves of affection and nervousness and an anxious lust, now fear pours off him like a heavy perfume.

"Mikey," Frank says again. "What did you do?"

Ray ends up driving Bert to the emergency room with Jamia, both of them rehearsing a careful lie involving a fall down a hill and a party gone awry. The rest of them clean up as quickly as they can, and Frank offers to drive Lindsey home, and then Mikey and Gerard are walking home alone together.

"It's a mind thing, right?" Gerard says. "I don't... Maybe you don't know all the specifics, but it's something to do with, what, messing with people's thoughts?"

Mikey knows exactly how to lie to Gerard, but he can never quite bring himself to. "Yeah," he says shortly. "I mean, I don't know. I hear... People's thoughts." He makes himself shrug.

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

It's not even very late in the day. This deep into the summer there are clusters of fireflies all around, and purple crocuses and lavender in full bloom in people's yards. It's beautiful the way suburbs can sometimes be beautiful. The sky tints smoggy and lavender where the sunset meets the turbid air blowing down from Manhattan.

"Should I ask you what you heard about me, or..."

"I wish you wouldn't."

Gerard nods. It's not that hard to understand, Mikey guesses.

"So what happened with Bert, then?" he asks finally.

Mikey isn't even sure where to start. “I never did anything like that before,” he says. “I don’t… Gerard, I think I really fucked up.”

They’re almost to their house. Gerard puts his arm around Mikey’s waist and brings him in close for a second. “We’ll figure it out,” he says, which is vague, but he says it with such confidence that Mikey can’t help but feel reassured. He hangs onto what he felt in Bert’s mind for now, though. He doesn’t want to worry Gerard if it’s nothing, and maybe, he thinks naively, maybe it’s nothing. It could definitely be nothing.

They’re standing on the porch while Mikey digs his keys out of his pocket when Gerard stops him. “You don’t… Know if he knows, right?” he asks. His eyes flick upwards, towards the house. Presumably, James is there.

“I dunno, Gee, I can’t. I’ve never. Except the one time, I’ve never been able to hear him.”

Gerard nods. “Best get it over with, then,” he says, and pushes open the front door.

 

*

 

Two dozen miles away Gabe is sitting with his feet up on the coffee table waiting for Bill to notice and swat at him. The restaurant where Bill works has an open back patio which leads to great business in the summertime, and Bill comes home several nights a week overwhelmed with tips. If they save wisely they might really make it through the winter without having to turn off their heat too often. 

Sometimes Bill brings home treats - this afternoon he has a plastic container of fresh strawberries he bought at the Union Square farmers’ market on his way home from the lunch shift at work - they taste like upstate, crisp air and clean water, perfectly sweet. They share the whole box, and it stains Bill’s mouth jolly rancher pink, and Gabe can’t help but reel him in by the wrist and kiss him.

He’s thinking more and more actively about tugging Bill all the way over into his lap and giving him his full attention when he feels it: the ley line connecting him to Bert fields a tug, then a push, then it snaps completely.

Gabe flinches as he feels the connection spiral back into him, undone.

“Gah, did I get you with my teeth?” Bill asks. He turns Gabe’s face in his hands and inspects his bottom lip.

“No,” Gabe says, and he knows he sounds distracted. He shakes himself out of it. “No, you’re fine, I just bit the inside of my cheek.” Laugh it off, it’s fine.

He hates lying to Bill but it’s for his own good. Bill can’t know what he is now, how much danger they both could be in because of it.

Bill is his entire world.

Gabe takes the trash out to the curb and Bill washes the dinner dishes and they fall into bed together. Afterward, when Bill is asleep and the windows are all thrown wide to tempt a crossbreeze in, Gabe lays on his back and thinks about the rumors going around town, and what he knows now.

Bert’s no good to him anymore, but that’s okay, he has other resources. He has to figure out a way to kill an immortal, which is daunting. The fact that somebody could force his control over Bert to break apart, that’s more curious. That, he may have to investigate further.

And then there’s the matter of somebody he hasn’t heard of at all until today, and then only in the vaguest terms, nothing concrete: word on the street is, there’s somebody who was changed in the storm who’s taken over an entire rail yard with hothouse flowers.

That, he’s got to look into.

 

*

 

“Christ, Gerard, what were you thinking?”

James hadn’t known anything, and Gerard had spilled the whole thing because it felt important, and now he’s here getting another lecture. Gerard doesn’t want to look at him, not really. He feels guilty, and he feels stupid for feeling guilty, and it’s not as though anything he says to James is going to make any difference, or matter at all. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I thought… I wanted. I don’t know.” There’s no use lying. “I wanted to feel close to someone.”

James scrubs his face with both hands. He shouldn’t be able to look tired, Gerard doesn’t think, except that he does. James puts a hand up to the side of Gerard’s face and leans in a little, like he could press his forehead to Gerard’s and hold him. Cold radiates off him where he’s nearly touching Gerard - it’s too much.

“God,” Gerard whispers. He’s leaning perilously close - if James was as solid as he looks, sometimes, Gerard would be slumped over on him. There are too many things they need to say to each other, enormous things, unnameable things, and Gerard can’t help himself. This isn’t the time, but he  _ wants.  _ James looks the same as he has since… Well. His hair’s in his eyes, the glint of his earring half in shadow, his t-shirt pulled taut across his chest and stomach. He  _ looks _ real. Gerard burns at the impossibility of it.

“I can go, if you want,” James says. He leans back a little bit, but he’s waiting for Gerard’s answer.

Gerard laughs, a hollow, bitter sound. “I don’t want you to go,” he says. “I want you to be here.” It sounds pathetic.

“I want to be here,” James says, not meeting his eyes. The chill rolling off him is palpable enough that Gerard can almost pretend it’s his cold hands. “I wish I could -” His hands flutter, one still at the side of Gerard’s face, the other loosely cupped beside his hip, as if in anticipation to hold it.

Gerard tries to lean into him and shudders at the cold. “This is so fucking stupid,” he says. “Like I hope it’s not too awkward for you to hear that I really could stand to get dicked down in a situation that doesn’t involve me dying at the end.”

James’s eyes maybe widen a little at that, Gerard can’t tell. He shrugs and sort of nods, like,  _ go ahead.  _ And. Well. Gerard bites his lip and palms himself through his jeans.

James’ gaze is fixed on Gerard’s hand, the way he’s just barely touching himself, working himself up. He leans as close as he can to Gerard’s ear without phasing through him. “God, Gee, the way you look,” he murmurs. If Gerard concentrates he can almost pretend he feels James’ breath on his neck.

Gerard thumbs open the button of his jeans and pushes the heel of his hand against his dick, just to take the edge off. He watches James watching him.

“James,” he gasps. His hips push up off the bed against his will, aching for friction. James is running a hand over his own chest, his lip clamped between his teeth. “Did you ever think about me like this, before?”

James laughs and it’s more breath than anything. His pupils are wide. He slides his hand up under his shirt. “Gerard, have you met me? I’ve thought about everyone I’ve ever met like this, and yes that includes all your friends, so don’t ask.” Gerard cracks an eyelid to glower at him. “A lot, Gee, I’ve thought about this… A lot.”

Gerard tips his head back. “So tell me,” he says, finally pushing his jeans down his thighs.

James moves behind Gerard on the bed, careful not to touch him. It’s polite, a little more distance than is strictly necessary, but it preserves the illusion that this, what they’re doing, is… Remotely normal. He settles in behind Gerard, and Gerard hears it in his breath more than he feels it at all. He closes his eyes and teases his cock with one hand.

“I used to think about you,” James says, low, in Gerard’s ear, “Just like this.” His arms move around Gerard’s waist, careful to hover just above his skin. He splays his hands and runs them over Gerard’s belly, his hips and thighs. Everywhere he almost touches gets goosebumps.

“And what would you do with me?” Gerard asks. His voice is half broken already. He watches James’ hands stroke over him because he can’t feel it. “What are we doing in your fantasy?”

“Well,” James says. He must be concentrating hard, every point of him at this point as close to Gerard as possible without phasing through. Gerard tries to imagine what it would be like to have James touch him for real. “You’re naked, for one thing.”

Gerard tugs off his t-shirt, one-handed. He turns over his shoulder and catches James’s smile, very close and small. He kicks off his jeans. “What else?”

James sounds strained when he speaks. “I’m taking my time with you,” he says, finally. “I’m touching you, everywhere, until you can’t stand it anymore.”

Gerard groans. “God, James,” he says again. He’s stroking himself off with slick, speedy motions, his hand blurring, fisting the head of his cock.

“I’m spending a while really opening you up,” James says into Gerard’s ear. “I’ve got you on your back, driving you crazy, just watching you.” Gerard watches one of James’s hands slide away, and he can hear the way James rucks his shirt up over his stomach. He feels dizzy with want. “You’re begging me, you just want me to touch your dick -”

“Tell me something I don’t know, asshole,” Gerard gasps. He has to give himself a careful squeeze to keep from coming right there. James laughs against him, dark and warm.

“When I finally start fucking you, you’re so turned on you can’t see straight. You’re already shaking, begging me…” James puts his hand over Gerard’s chest, and he’s actually phasing through, just a little. The familiar, horrible sensation of cold where James is trying to touch him makes sweat pop out along his spine, makes his nipples firm up.

“Christ, James, don’t  _ do  _ that,” he groans, and James jerks back like he’s been stung.

“Sorry,” he says. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I just -”

“Shut up,” Gerard mumbles. It hurts, it really does, when James touches him for real. It’s frigid and intrusive and it forces all the breath out of his body in a shuddering gasp. “I wish you could, James, I wish…” He trails off. The urgency has gone out of the moment. Gerard feels numbed both by James’ touch and its absence. “James,” he says on a sigh. “What do you really want?”

The question is too big to answer. James takes a stuttering breath - the sound mocks them both, since he doesn’t  _ need _ to breathe, since he  _ can’t _ \- and lets it out in a slow sigh. “Can I tell you about the best part?” he asks.

Gerard nods. He shuts his eyes and let’s James’ voice fill him up.

“My favorite part,” James starts, and he sounds shy, almost embarrassed, which is rich for him - James has never been ashamed of anything in his life, Gerard thinks. “Is after I make you come.” He moves closer to Gerard’s side, and when Gerard opens his eyes, James’ face is very close. “I’m kissing you,” he says. He has his arms hovering around Gerard, one looped low around his waist, the other across his chest. “And I’m holding you, just like this.”

They sit like that for a long moment. Gerard feels naked, because he is, and because James isn’t, and because it’s a profoundly unsettling thing to feel known by another person. “James?” he says, finally. “I can’t think of a sensitive way to ask but like… Can ghosts get boners?”

James snorts, and then they both can’t stop laughing. “Yeah, Gerard, I’m pretty sure we can.”

“Can you take off your clothes?” The practical mechanics of ghosthood are still mostly a mystery to him. He wonders if James can come, if James can jerk off… If he can watch James do it.

“I mean,” James says, and his smile turns lewd. “We can find out?”

James can take off his clothes, it turns out, and he sprawls at the head of Gerard’s bed with his legs open, touching himself with an offhanded laziness that makes Gerard’s mouth water. “Come on,” he says. He’s eyeing the way Gerard’s gaze is snagged on his dick, on the way it slips through his loose fist.

Gerard gets up on his knees and shuffles forward, settling down in the open vee of James’ legs. He palms his dick, watching the way James is just playing with himself. He’s got one hand on his cock, barely stroking, and the other stuttering over his chest, absently thumbing his nipples. The look in his eyes as he watches Gerard is intense and dark.

“I want to feel your hands on me,” Gerard says, stroking up his cock with the flat of his hand. He finds it easier to pretend they’re not together, like there’s a pane of glass separating them or they’re on opposite ends of a phone line. “I want you to haul me onto your cock and fuck me like you mean it.”

James closes his eyes. The hand that’s been tracing lines over his chest comes up and he bites down on his knuckles like it’ll help him last. The hand on his dick is a lot less idle, now. Gerard tries to match him stroke for stroke.

“You don’t even need to touch me,” he gasps, thumbing over the head of his dick. “I’ll come just from you fucking me, just from the way you feel in me.”

“That’s an overestimation of my prowess,” James grits out. “Besides, I _want_ to touch you. Feel you hot and heavy in my hand, know how it feels when you come.” He shoves his hair out of his face with his free hand. “I want to make you come so hard you feel like you’re going blind, or dying.” He laughs. “Bad word choice, I know.”

“Don’t,” he says, and he knows it’s selfish. This is James’ life, or his afterlife, or whatever, but he doesn’t want to hear about it right now. “Can we just… Please…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” James says. His eyes are hooded, watching the way Gerard’s jacking his dick with one hand, reaching down between his legs with the other to press behind his balls. It’s not showy, it doesn’t look effortless on him the way it does in porn. He’s hunched over and his stomach creases, his wrist is tweaked to get the right angle. He’s staring at James’s dick with an vacant, lusty expression, like his brain has shut down. His chest is flushed. James thinks he’s fucking beautiful. “God, you’re fucking beautiful,” he says. If dying can teach you one thing, it’s to say what you’re thinking while you’ve got the chance.

Gerard snorts. “Fuck off,” he says. He’s close already, ramping himself up until he can almost taste it, then slowing down. He’s not ready for it to be over. James is just watching him, his mouth slack, pupils huge and black. The angle of his wrist makes his forearm flex - Gerard can see the way the muscle distorts his stupid kanji tattoos on every upstroke. “God, that’s hot,” he mumbles. James has great hands, broad and strong. His nails are still blacked out in fading sharpie, and they’ve been bitten ragged. Gerard wants him to hold him down with those hands, to leave him helpless, to tease him and manhandle him and make him come.

“Fuck,” James says indistinctly. They’ve never kissed, they’ve never had sex, but Gerard can tell he’s close anyway, the way he’s biting his lip, the way his chest stutters on every breath. Gerard wants to hold out for him, wants to get off from watching James get off. He slows the pace of his hand but he can feel the way his skin gets hot, the way his nerves are on fire from the backs of his calves to his neck. He blinks sweat out of his eyes.

“C’mon, James, I’m so fucking close,” he says. He blinks again, almost dizzy with the way his blood fizzes. He can feel his heart hammering in his chest, hear the blood rushing in his ears. He’s not gonna make it. “Please,” he gasps, and then he slumps forward, coming on his chest and stomach.

James stares at Gerard. He’s loose-limbed and blissful and spent, and James wants nothing more than to lean up and lick him clean. He’s jerking himself off with intent, now; he wants to come. Gerard leans forward, his arms spread around James, hands on the mattress on either side of James’ hips. He’s as close as he dare get - they’re keeping up a fragile illusion, like they can be together, like this isn’t fucked up. He doesn’t want to ruin it by putting a hand straight through James’s chest.

“I’m kissing you,” he says. “I want to be kissing you.”

James’s hand is blurred on his dick. He’s never had great stamina - he doesn’t even know if he  _ can _ come, but it’s definitely harder to get off when you’re dead. He focuses on Gerard’s face above him, the bead of sweat that traces his browbone, how beautiful he is and how much want there is in his eyes. He fucking hates himself for not doing this when he was alive.

“Gerard,” he murmurs. He can see Gerard’s come dripping down his pale stomach towards his softening cock.

“Please,” Gerard says. “Please, James, come on.” Like he’s still waiting on his own orgasm, like James getting off is the only thing that matters. “Want you.” His face is still red, still sweaty. He’d look messy and spent and ugly if James weren’t so goddamn attracted to him.

“I swear, I’m usually a hair trigger,” he says with a rueful smile. He puts his free hand carefully beside Gerard’s face, careful not to touch him. “Look, I don’t even know if it’ll happen, man.”

Gerard’s smile crumples. “No,” he says, scooting closer, peering into James’s eyes. “No, come on, please, James, please -” He sounds wrecked, and it goes through James like a hot knife through butter. “I need you,” he babbles, “Please, I want you, James, god -”

James’s eyes slam shut when he comes. It’s intense, it feels like he’s coming forever, like he comes so hard he’s dead. In the post-orgasm haze he has to remind himself not to put it to Gerard like that. When he can feel his limbs again - sort of, they never quite feel as substantial as they did when he was alive - he lifts himself back up on his elbows and looks into Gerard’s eyes. Gerard looks satisfied but sad, which… Fair.

“Come on,” James says. “Lay down with me.” He turns onto his side on Gerard’s bed and scoots back to leave room for Gerard between him and the wall. Between them, their hands and knees nearly touch. Gerard can feel the chill that comes off James in waves, the same way he used to radiate warmth in life. He always complained that he ran too hot, wore his stupid shorts through November, felt like a goddamn furnace against Gerard’s side when he slung an arm around him. Gerard looks into his face, sated and slack, opaque, like he could reach out and stroke away the strand of patchily dyed blue hair that’s fallen across his cheek. He misses James acutely from eight inches away.

“I love you,” he says. It feels heavy and clumsy on his tongue. He’s said it plenty, and it never feels any less awkward or desperate or sad.

James says Gerard’s name on a sigh. “I wish you didn’t,” he says, finally. “I love you but I wish….” He lets the thought fade. It’s something he could only express with words he doesn’t know, a wish too big for his vocabulary. They lay together, almost touching. “I love you,” he says, finally, because what else  _ can _ he say. It’s the truth.

He watches Gerard fall asleep. He wishes he could do the same.

 

*

 

Frank parks down the block from Lindsey’s house and they each smoke a cigarette. His hands are shaking, but so are hers, so she can’t totally out-tough him this time. 

“You okay?” he asks lamely.

Lindsey blows a careful stream of smoke out the window. “I’m not the one with a boyfriend that went all Akira on somebody tonight, man, I’m good,” she says.

This is probably the only way Lindsey knows how to invite him to talk about it, and he takes it for what it is. “I’m, like… I don’t want to be scared of Mikey.”

Lindsey shrugs. “I’m scared of all of you. I’m scared of me, too, sometimes.” She jams her cigarette into an empty pepsi can. “Talk to him about it. It’ll do you both a world of good.”

She gets out without saying goodbye, but then she leans back in through the open passenger window and says, “I mean it. And thanks for the ride.”

 

*

 

After they’re done at the hospital, Ray asks Jamia for two favors. The first is easy: they stop at Ray’s bank just before it closes and he withdraws two thousand dollars in hundreds. It’s almost all of his savings. He stuffs the envelope with the cash as deep into his jeans pocket as it’ll go. 

The second favor is harder. Jamia has to know from her accidental trip through his memories exactly where he’s directing her, but she’s tactful, she doesn’t say anything. She pulls up outside of James’s mom’s house and parks.

“Should I wait for you?” she asks.

Ray shakes his head. “I know how to get home from here,” he says. He can see Jamia trying to work out what he’s doing, trying to piece it all together, but it’s… He can’t talk about it, not yet. It’s just something he has to do.

James’s mom answers the door. “Ray,” she says, surprised. “Come in!”

“I don’t want to impose, ma’am, I was just.” He follows her into the kitchen. He hadn’t quite thought this far in advance, and everything he wants to say sounds lame in his head. “Listen, I know you don’t drive stick.”

She looks at him. He hopes she doesn’t think he’s asking for a handout.

“Just, I know Smack has a car and you have your own and you don’t drive stick, and I don’t know if you were planning to sell… James’s truck, but.” He digs the envelope out of his pocket. “If you’d part with it, I mean, I know it’s not that much but I just.” He stops. “I could really use it, and I could… I mean. I’m sorry.”

To his astonishment, James’s mom sets the envelope down unopened on the kitchen table and pulls Ray into a hug. She’s much smaller than he is but she squeezes him with the sort of fierce, genuine warmth that James used to, that he must’ve learned from her.

All told Ray gets to drive himself home that night, with seven hundred dollars still in his pocket at James’s mom’s insistence that the truck was “a piece of junk that’s bound to need work, God knows why he loved it so much.”

It looks right parked in front of his apartment building, in the same spot that James used to use, that he never quite got good at parallel parking in. It takes Ray two tries to get close enough to the curb.

In his apartment, he drops his keys onto the kitchen counter, shakes a handful of fish food flakes into Klaus’s tank, and collapses onto the futon bed that now only barely smells like James, and lets himself cry as much as he needs to.


End file.
